You are here: American University Washington College of Law Impact Initiatives Programs Techlaw News1 Tech, Law & Security Program

Tech, Law & Security Program

Back to top

Kathy Kleiman Headshot

Summer Get to Know TLS Feature: Senior Fellow Professor Kathy Kleiman. 

August 29th, 2023

As we near the end of the summer, we wanted to share what TLS has been up to! Senior Fellow Kathy Kleiman is up first based not only her depth of experience but how busy her summer has started out. Kleiman joined AUWCL in 2019 and teaches Internet Technology & Governance for Lawyers. For three years, 2019-2022, she also taught in the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic as Practitioner-in-Residence. She is also currently a Senior Policy Fellow with AUWCL’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property and a longtime Fellow with AU’s cross-community Internet Governance Lab.  

Her summer has been nothing if not eventful so far! Below are several highlights:

  • On May 18, she was the IEEE Silicon Valley Industry Hub “Impact Speaker” at the Computer History Museum sharing the story of the ENIAC Programmers before a great and diverse audience of Internet innovators and signing “Proving Ground” books. To learn more about the incredible history of the ENIAC Programmers, get your copy of “Proving Ground” here!
  • On June 10-11, American University hosted the North American School of Internet Governance for newcomers from around the world, and in addition to being part of the host group, she served on a dynamic panel, Women Pioneers and Inclusion, with ICANN Board Chair Tripti Sinha and Marita Moll, a telecommunications leader in Canada, to share stories of barriers faced and overcome during our careers in Internet policy. The panel and more of the NASIG event is achieved here.
  • On June 12-15, Washington D.C. hosted ICANN77, a global convening of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) with oversight of key aspects of the Internet infrastructure.  Kleiman spoke on several panels, including two presentations of the proposed new "Framework for Closed Generic gTLDs," written by a special group of industry, non-profits, and governmental representatives (on which Kleiman served), and outlining how ICANN might responsibly delegate "closed generic gTLDs" - top level domains of "generic words" for entire industries, e.g., .book, .telecom, and .cyber. 
  • At ICANN77, Kleiman and others kicked off the 20th Anniversary of the Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) with a special NCUC Issues Forum and examined two pressing issues (1) Trade Barriers and Sanctions using the Domain Name System, and (2) Challenges to ICANN’s Multistakeholder Model from proposal to allow future generic top level domain name registries (competitors with .com, .org and .net) to write their own rules with ICANN rather than working through ICANN’s Multistakeholder process. She helped organize and spoke on the second panel.
  • On Friday, June 16, Kleiman was seated on the Board of Directors of The Public Interest Registry, the largest non-profit  generic top level domain (gTLD) registry in the world, and responsible for stable and security operation of gTLDs including .ORG, .NGO and .CHARITY.  She was elected to this seat by the Internet Society, a global organization based in Reston, VA.
  • On July 25, Kleiman’s book came out in paperback!
  • On August 8, Kleiman traveled to Los Angeles to keynote ACM SIGGRAPH 2023, the Association for Computing Machinery’s conference & exhibition on computer graphics & interactive techniques and join in the SIGGRAPH 50th Anniversary celebrations.

Our TLS Senior Fellows bring high levels of expertise in their fields and we look forward to sharing more about their engagements and involvement in the community!