Kaveh Ranjbar

right now:

• i build whisper security with my co-founder and lifelong friend, soroush. we map the internet's infrastructure, its routes, names, certificates and hosts, into one living graph, and at whisper.online we give machines and ai agents a real, verifiable identity, anchored in dns.
• i still write standards. at the ietf i am working on rooting identity in dnssec and dane, and on letting rdap follow a delegation down to whoever actually holds the data: dane-anchored identity, dids rooted in dnssec, and rdap referrals for subordinate resources.
• i live in the netherlands with my dog, baloot, and spend a lot of time in st andrews, scotland.
• you can email me: kaveh@kaveh.org

a little about me:

• born in tehran, iran, into a middle class liberal family. my mother was a nurse and my father a documentary filmmaker. they met in rome, during their studies.
• i got my first computer at 7 and learned how the world connects through networks by 11.
• i helped build the first networks in iran, connecting people online since 1994.
• co-founded the largest business isp in iran and helped tens of other isps in the country and the region to start. founded two successful startups in iran while studying in the uk.
• studied pure mathematics and continued with computer science (formal methods in software engineering), with a masters from the university of oxford.
• left iran in 2001, and since then i have lived in dubai, oxford, london, amsterdam and rotterdam, and these days i also spend a lot of time in st andrews.
• i worked for 15 years to keep the global internet running for people everywhere. at the ripe ncc, as chief information officer from 2008 to 2023, i ran one of the internet's 13 root servers, k-root, the world's largest internet measurement network, ripe atlas, and the ripe database. back in 2012 i co-authored the early ietf drafts that became rdap, the successor to whois.
• i served on the icann board of directors for 6 years, from 2016 to 2022, chairing its technical committee, and sat on rssac and rzerc for the root server system. i chaired the ietf trust from 2017 to 2019, through the final steps of the iana transition, and served on the ietf administrative oversight committee. i built communities and met people across 110+ countries around the world.
• i love my home country, iran, but i strongly believe in a free internet and have acted forcefully on it, so the last time i could visit was in 2016. not a fan of a jail cell, otherwise i would have visited more often. i am fully against the dictatorship and the government there, and within my expertise i will do anything possible to make the people of iran, and anywhere else, more free.
• love understanding the world through philosophy, math, biology and the dynamics of emergence.
• i understand the world as a network of connected beliefs and ideas, a system where everything links to everything else. i think of it as a graph of infinite tuples shaped like:
  $⟨\mathrm{jtb}\subset ℝ,\mathrm{type}\subset \mathbb{N}⟩$$⟷\text{predicate}⟷$$⟨\mathrm{jtb}\subset ℝ,\mathrm{type}\subset \mathbb{N}⟩$
  (in short, the world can be understood as infinite justified true beliefs, from a set of countable types (dimensions), which connect to another set of infinite beliefs within a set of countable dimensions. at scale, rules emerge and common understanding inevitably gets shaped between all people and systems, because dimensions create natural limits on what can affect what.)

some things i believe:

• i know there are a lot of things i don't understand
  • and i know there are some things i know i understand
  • and i know there are a lot of things i "think" i understand
  • but my real interest is in the things that i don't know but i understand
  • i do a lot of self reflection to know those
• ultimate control is lack of control
  • if i can observe and understand, i have full control
  • if i try to exert power, i am trying to control. trying to control means i don't understand, which is totally fine but not what i like. i like to spend that energy to figure out what i don't understand and understand it
  • most people are stuck in a control loop, and if i can, i like to show them there is another possibility as well
• things emerge in all networks, and trying to control them, at best, delays the inevitable shape
  • i respect the natural order of things, there is the most real feedback in how things have agreed to work
  • if i don't like that order, my first step is to understand why that order has taken shape in that community
  • and then i try to find other communities which share patterns i like, and to connect the network i don't like to the one that i desire. if i was right in my disliking, i will end up with a sustainable community that i like!
• existence means a desire for continuation
  • longevity, sustainability and reproduction are anything's strategy to "keep existing"
  • the environment is of course emergent and nothing can predict how it changes, because knowing how it changes, changes how it emerges
  • to "keep existing", everything picks a strategy. everything can affect a finite number of resources at any given time, so everything bets. smarter or more powerful cannot have a meaning in a universal context
• running organisations should be based on giving trust and eliminating mistrust
  • the most important tool of a leader is listening, not to metrics, but to people: from team members to customers to critics
  • being able to set up a sustainable loop, where input from all possible sources comes in and gets translated into actions that all stakeholders can subscribe to, or at least not object to, means being able to set up the best organisation in the world
  • people matter, and understanding people is the heart of being a good human. nobody is stupid, nobody is irrelevant. of course sometimes you have to stop listening to certain voices, but that is the hardest decision and it means limiting potential (which is a valid strategy sometimes)
• change is inevitable, and the source of change is always external
  • even if the source is fully known and understandable, the resulting change is still "random" to any observer, as their reactions to change, even when countable, can as a collective result in uncountable outcomes
  • the goal is to guess the best strategy, and to guess the best strategy, organisms or organisations should use their resources efficiently to rely as much as possible on external forces, but arrange their internal organs to be as resilient as possible
  • the downsides are worth it
• simple, small, fast to change is the way to go
  • the right breakdown of responsibilities, while relying on the least number of different "types" of external forces, is always the best bet
  • this means that as a whole the organism relies on as many different types of external forces as possible, but per unit, it has special units which rely on the least possible number of external forces
  • internally, minimising the types always wins. organs should translate all the chaos they understand from outside into one, or the bare minimum number of types necessary to operate
• systems work best when they are open to new information but careful with what they create: be as liberal as you can imagine in what you receive, be as conservative as possible in what you send, and if you do not understand what you have received, always ignore it, except when it is really necessary to complain
  • everything said above, and everything omitted above, is encompassed in this "robustness principle", the way networks and systems stay healthy
  • this is why diversity matters, why listening to people matters, why separation of responsibilities matters, and why there is a natural limit for everything in this world when translating information from one space to another
• there is only abundance, everything is abundant
  • if something is limited, it is because it's being looked at from the wrong "type" space
  • limits are rooted in the observer

elsewhere:

• whisper.security and whisper.online, what i build
• ietf datatracker, my drafts
• icannwiki, my icann years
• icann axioms, icann's bylaws read as a small set of axioms
• x, github and linkedin, where i am kakooch