Journalist and moderator

Urs Eppenberger has a degree in electronics from ETH Zurich. He has worked for the SWITCH foundation since he graduated, helping to build the Swiss Internet. Today, Urs Eppenberger is in charge of SWITCH’s registry for the top-level domains .ch and .li. He is responsible for the stable operation of the related services, focusing on safeguarding the DNS as a critical infrastructure and protecting users in collaboration with the Federal Administration and the Internet industry.

Richard Wein has been Commercial Manager of Austria's official domain registry nic.at since 2000. nic.at administers all domain names with the endings .at. co.at. and or.at. The state-certified Business Economist can look back on several years of experience in the fields of controlling and commercial management in different industrial enterprises. At nic.at, he is responsible for Finance, Administration and Marketing & Sales. In this role, he regularly attends international meetings of the domain sector (ICANN, CENTR, etc.). Richard Wein also is Managing Director of nic.at's sister companies tldbox GmbH, ipcom GmbH with the product RcodeZero DNS and of CERT.at GmbH. tldbox GmbH offers backend registry services and consulting for new gTLDs. RcodeZero DNS is an Anycast Service provided by nic.at and targeted at corporations, Internet service providers and Top Level Domains.

Andreas Musielak is COO and member of the Executive Board of DENIC eG, the managing organisation of Germany’s ccTLD .de. He is responsible for Finance, Legal and Human Resources as well as Member and End Customer Services and is Co-Managing Director of the subsidiary DENIC Services GmbH & Co. KG. He is actively involved in international meetings of the domain industry within the sphere of ICANN as well as of the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries, CENTR, and is Chair of the standing Strategic and Operational Planning Standing Committee (SOPC) of ICANN's Country Code Names Supporting Organisation (ccNSO). He also is a member of the Information Economy Committee of the Frankfurt Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Thomas Keller is CTO and member of the Executive Board of DENIC eG, the managing organisation of Germany’s ccTLD .de. He is responsible for Product Management, Technology/Security, Marketing as well as Policy & Public Relations. Thomas has been in the Internet industry since 1997. He has been actively involved in the ICANN/ccTLD environment for more than two decades and contributed to a range of working groups in various positions. He also is co-founder and Board member of ID4me.

Adrienne Fichter completed a master's degree in political science, economics and social history as well as constitutional law at the University of Zurich. In 2009, Fichter built up the web start-up Polinetz as co-founder and community manager, which won the Data Journalism Award in 2012 and the Grimme Online Award in 2013. From 2012 to 2014, she worked as social media editorial manager at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ).

Fichter is a lecturer and speaker at the University of Applied Sciences St. Gallen and the University of Zurich. In 2017, she published the book "Smartphone-Democracy" with the publisher NZZ Libro, for which she was also a co-author. In 2018, she came second in the Social Journalist of the Year category, which is voted on annually by the readers of the trade journal Schweizer Journalist. In 2020, she took first place in the research category. In 2020, she published the book "Das Netz ist politisch. Teil1".

Robert Schischka has been CTO of Austria’s official domain registry nic.at since September2003. nic.at administers all domain names with the endings .at. co.at. and or.at. Robert Schischka also is CTO of nic.at’s sister companies tldbox GmbH and ipcom GmbH. Additionally, he has been director of the national Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT.at GmbH), a subsidiary of nic.at, since 2008. His professional focus as managing director is on IT strategy, IT architecture and infrastructure and IT security. 

Robert Schischka studied business economics at the University of Economics in Vienna, specialising in commercial information technology and controlling. He gained his profound experience as a security expert during his occupation in a subsidiary company of the Austrian National Bank and as a consultant with the internationally active IT-consulting company CSC.

Wolfgang Kleinwaechter is a Professor for International Communication Policy and Regulation at the Department for Media and Information Studies of the University of Aarhus in Denmark. He is involved in Internet Governance issues since the early 1990s. He active participated in the UN World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), where he was a member of the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG), in the Internet Governance Forum, where he was the special Adviser to the Chair and in ICANN, where he chaired, inter alia, the Nominating Committee (NomCom). among other positions. In 2009 the Council of Europe appointed him to chair the COE Cross Border Internet Expert Group.

Geoff Huston AM is the Chief Scientist at APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry serving the Asia Pacific region. He has been closely involved with the development of the Internet for many years, where he lead the effort of the initial deployment of the Internet in Australia from the Australian academic and research sector. Geoff has worked for the largest Australian communications service provider, Telstra, in senior engineering, architecture and research roles assisting with the large-scale deployment of the Internet across Australia and as a transit service provider in the Asia Pacific region. Among other things, Geoff has served on the Internet Architecture Board and the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society. His current research interests include DNS, routing security, and measurements.

Nicolas Zahn studied political science in Zurich and international relations in Geneva and Washington D.C. After completing a master's thesis on Internet regulation, he graduated from the Mercator College for International Affairs with a focus on digital transformation in the public sector. He worked as an IT consultant and is currently project manager at the Swiss Digital Initiative Foundation. In addition, he advises organizations on digital transformation as an independent expert and is politically engaged as a ParlDigi Champion for more digital policy. He blogs on various aspects of digitalization and lectures at universities of applied sciences on the interface between technology and international politics.