Governance Committee of the Board (BGC)

As Vice President of Technology at Akamai Technologies, Christian Kaufmann leads the Technology department, which is responsible for driving the technical evolution of the Akamai Edge platform, including a wide set of responsibilities like hardware engineering, data center architecture, network architecture and engineering, and software and systems development.

Christian has extensive experience in corporate governance, including hiring Chief Executive Officers and handling mergers and acquisitions. He has served on various other boards over the last 15 years, including at Internet Exchanges and the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC).

Before joining Akamai, Christian worked in various technical and managerial roles at several Internet service providers and carriers, including Telia Sonera, Easynet, and Cable & Wireless.

Christian has a Master of Science in Advanced Networking from The Open University in the U.K. He also holds various technical certifications, including Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) and Juniper Networks Certified Internet Expert (JCNIE) certifications.

He was nominated to serve on the ICANN Board of Directors by the Address Supporting Organization (ASO) in 2022. His term will expire at the Annual General Meeting in 2025.

Dr. Catherine Adeya, a Senior Digital Transformation and Governance Specialist, is an experienced leader and advocate who has worked over 25 years in technology and development. She has rich experience across academia, civil society, government, and the private sector. Catherine was the Director of Research at the World Wide Web Foundation until November 2022. She was responsible for coordinating a global research team, dedicated to achieving a web that is safe and empowering for everyone. She oversaw the organization's groundbreaking research in areas of Internet access, privacy and data rights, and women's rights online, focused on low- and middle-income countries. Catherine has extensive knowledge of ICT for Development, and has numerous publishing and speaking credits on the topic. After her doctoral studies, Catherine began working as a Research Fellow at the United Nations University's Institute for New Technologies in Maastricht, The Netherlands, in 1998.

In 2002, driven by a commitment to tackling global inequality, Catherine moved back to Africa to advocate for the use of digital technologies to expand opportunities and drive development. She was involved in research linking ICT and poverty, critical success factors for the business process outsourcing industry, and collaborated with organizations like the International Development Research Centre. In 2005, she moved from academia to work with civil society on ICTs for Development. Catherine has also been involved in the Kenya ICT policy process since 2006 through the Kenya ICT Action Network, which was the beginning of ICT networks for participatory democracy and economic growth in Kenya.

Catherine was appointed to the first Board of Directors of the Kenya ICT Board (now the ICT Authority of Kenya) in 2007. She has also served as the Director of Business Process Outsourcing/Information Technology Enabled Services at Kenya's Ministry of ICT, in addition to serving as founder CEO of the Konza Technopolis Development Authority. She was also instrumental in the development of the East Africa Centre for Internet Governance and Policy at Strathmore University in Nairobi.

She is an independent Non-executive Director at Standard Chartered Bank Kenya and Old Mutual East Africa Holdings, where she is the Chair of the Technology and Innovation Committees (with a core focus on cybersecurity oversight). She also serves on the advisory board of the East Africa Infrastructure Platform.

Catherine received an undergraduate degree in Information Sciences from Moi University in Kenya. Her postgraduate studies culminated in a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Information and Development from Edinburgh, Scotland. She has certifications in corporate governance, Cybersecurity Audits Training, and Board Governance and Leadership Masterclass.

Catherine has executive education training in Women's Leadership from Yale University; Cybersecurity and Executive Strategy training from Stanford University; and has taken an Innovation-Driven Organizations Masterclass from the Institute of Directors in Kenya.

Catherine was selected in 2023 to serve on the ICANN Board of Directors by the Nominating Committee for a three-year term. Her term will expire at the Annual General Meeting 2026.

Sarah Deutsch is a practicing attorney with considerable experience on Internet policy and related legal issues. Sarah worked for over 23 years at Verizon Communications as Vice President and Deputy General Counsel in its Legal Department. She managed the company’s global intellectual property practice and team of legal and technical personnel responsible for trademarks, domain names, copyrights, patent licensing and portfolio management and unfair competition issues. Her responsibilities included federal, state and international matters involving counseling, litigation, and Internet policy, including close coordination with Verizon’s technical teams and engineers.

Sarah has served as a subject matter expert in Verizon’s Legal Department on Internet issues since the mid 1990s. She has extensive experience in IP policy, online liability issues, privacy, cyber-security and consumer protection issues and related advocacy before the US Congress, federal agencies, state legislatures, and global bodies including WIPO, OECD, and other legislative and regulatory bodies. Sarah was the first attorney to oversee Verizon’s Privacy Office, including managing its Chief Privacy Officer, privacy attorneys and staff. She was a Lecturer of Law at Harvard Law School, teaching a class in online privacy in 2019.

Sarah was one of five negotiators for the U.S. telecommunications industry in the negotiations that led to the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. She also served as a Private Sector Advisor to U.S. Delegation to the WIPO Copyright Treaties and to the G8 Cybercrime Conference. Sarah was the 2014 recipient of the Managing IP In-House Counsel Award at the American Women in Business Law Awards. In 2009, she received the Public Knowledge President’s Award for Extraordinary Dedication to Protecting the Free Flow of Information Over the Internet.

Sarah has been involved in ICANN issues since its inception, working on numerous issues over the years with the Business Constituency and the IPC. She has also coordinated closely with the ISPCP. Sarah served as the Business Constituency’s Commercial Stakeholder Group representative, and also represented the BC on the Nominating Committee. She currently serves on the Board of the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, the nonprofit Edgemoor Research Institute and the nonprofit National Center for Health Research.

Prior to joining Verizon, Sarah was an associate in the law firm of Morgan, Lewis Bockius. She holds a J.D. from American University, Washington College of Law and a B.A. from Emory University. She was nominated to serve on the ICANN Board by the Nominating Committee in 2017. Her term will expire at the Annual General Meeting 2026.

Dr. James Galvin has over three decades of experience in secure and robust operations in all aspects of networking and the life cycle of a domain name. He currently serves as Identity Digital, Inc. Director of Strategic Relationships, applying this experience to the development of technical standards and policies in support of strategic initiatives to advance secure and robust operations. James began his career in 1989 developing Internet Standards in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for secure email, secure network management, and DNS security, which are still applicable and in use today. He continues to be an active participant in the IETF where he currently serves as Co-Chair of the Registration Extensions Protocols Working Group, the working group currently responsible for all Internet Standards related to the operation of domain name registration services and the protocol interactions between registries and registrars. He has been part of ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) since 2002, and served as its Vice Chair for seven years until December 2017. He has served the ICANN community as chair of various technical expert working groups and has engaged in multiple PDPs. He is currently active in the Registry Stakeholder Group DNS Abuse Working Group, the contracted party’s technical operations working group (CPH TechOps), and the CPH RDAP working group. James is a Pioneering Member of the Internet Society, and served as its Vice President of Chapters and Individuals from 2002 until 2005. He has been a member of both the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) since the early 1980s. James was appointed to serve as the SSAC’s non-voting liaison to the ICANN Board on 28 October 2021.

Byron Holland (MBA, ICD.D) has been the President and CEO of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) since 2008. An expert in Internet governance and a seasoned entrepreneur, he has C-level experience in private and not-for-profit sectors. Under Byron’s leadership, CIRA has evolved from a single-service registry to a globally recognized, multi-product, commercial not-for-profit. Now one of the leading country code top level domains (ccTLDs) in the world, CIRA manages over 3.4 million domains, with more than 30% of the world’s TLDs using its domain name system (DNS) services. Byron represents CIRA internationally in global policy work and has played a pivotal role in shaping key Internet governance decisions, holding prominent leadership positions within the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), including Chair of the Customer Standing Committee, and serving as both Chair and Vice Chair of the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO). He also served on the nominations committee for the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) from 2019-2022. Byron currently sits on the Board of Directors as Vice Chair of TorIX, Canada’s largest internet exchange point and as Treasurer of the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries. The ccNSO selected Byron in March 2025 to serve on the ICANN Board. His term will expire at the Annual General Meeting in 2027.

Sajid Rahman is a multidisciplinary leader who has worked in the financial services, health care, renewable energy, and technology sectors. He served as Managing Director at Standard Chartered Bank at locations across Asia and Africa. Later, Sajid founded a social business in health care, serving over five million people. Currently, he is the Managing Partner of MyAsiaVC – a venture capital firm investing in the second-order impacts of macro trends. He is also the founder of industry-scale renewable energy projects.

Sajid is an experienced board member. He is the Chair of the Audit Committee of a public-sector bank and adviser to a number of startups. He is an architect of an accelerator program for rural entrepreneurs and subject-matter experts. He is a well-known business strategist and capable change agent with over 20 years of experience at the senior management level and 10 years of experience at the board level, managing transformation and growth agendas.

Sajid is a writer on technology trends and has been published regularly in tech journals. He is a notable speaker at global forums on health, technology, and financial services organized by Financial Times, Bloomberg, Mobile World Congress, Royal School of Medicine, Fortune Magazine, etc.

Sajid has a master's degree in Commerce and is a scholar of the Financial Times Non-Executive Director diploma program.

He was nominated to serve as an ICANN Board Director by the Nominating Committee in 2022. His term will expire at the Annual General Meeting in 2028.

Ambassador (ret.) Miriam Sapiro is a non-resident Senior Adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Throughout her career, Miriam has worked successfully with governments and international organizations around the world to address complex challenges at the intersection of international and domestic policy. She has served in senior roles in the U.S. government, including at the National Security Council (NSC), the State Department, and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and in the private sector and NGO community. Upon confirmation by the U.S. Senate with the rank of Ambassador, Miriam was Deputy and then Acting U.S. Trade Representative, leading negotiations and enforcement to improve U.S. competitiveness, secure labor and environmental rights, and advance innovation. She also served on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).

Miriam’s government experience spans Democratic and Republican administrations and includes working in the White House at the NSC as Special Assistant to the President and Counselor for Southeast European Stabilization and Reconstruction, and as Director of European affairs. She began her career at the State Department as an international lawyer before joining the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff. In that role, she helped negotiate the Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war in Bosnia.

In addition to ICANN, Miriam is on the board of directors of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), which strengthens democracy by supporting fair and transparent elections around the world. She has served as the inaugural Polis distinguished fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, the chief executive officer and president of the NGO alliance InterAction, and a member of the Supervisory Board of Lufthansa. She also co-led the Washington, DC offices of two strategic communications firms, Finsbury and Sard Verbinnen.

Miriam has been involved in the ICANN community since 2001, reflecting a deep familiarity with and commitment to ICANN’s mission and preserving the multistakeholder model. She has worked on issues ranging from country code top level domain (ccTLD) redelegation requirements to evaluation of new generic top level domains (gTLDs) and further expansion of the domain name system (DNS). She was an active participant in the inaugural Internet Governance Forum in support of ICANN’s continued independence and later worked to support the milestone of transferring stewardship of the IANA functions from the U.S. Department of Commerce to the global Internet community.

Miriam received her BA from Williams College and JD from the NYU School of Law, and she was a Rotary fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University.

Miriam was selected in 2024 to serve on the ICANN Board of Directors by the Nominating Committee for a three-year term. Her term will expire at the Annual General Meeting 2027.