Peter Dengate Thrush is a globally recognised leader of Internet infrastructure and governance organisations. His involvement in Internet Governance began in 1995 when he advised InternetNZ, then recently formed to assume responsibility for the .nz Top Level Domain. He became President of InternetNZ, and was a long-time Chair of its International Affairs Committee.
As a respected intellectual property barrister he made substantial contributions to World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) work in 1999-2000 on domain names, and was instrumental in developing the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) – a global, compulsory arbitration process applying to generic domain names. He was involved in the development of ICANN in 1998, assisting in the formation of its Country Code and Intellectual Property constituencies, and served on its Independent Review Advisory Committee. He was part of the leadership team of the global country code (ccTLD) managers constituency, creating the Country Code Names Support Organisation (ccNSO) in ICANN, which elected him to the ICANN board in 2005. He succeeded Vint Cerf as Chairman in 2007, serving until 2011. At ICANN, he led the process to replace the direct US Government oversight of ICANN with accountability to the global Internet community. From 2003-2007 he was Vice Chair then Chairman of the Association of AsiaPacific country code managers (APTLD). In all of his Internet Governance leadership positions and through his public speaking and other work, he has been as tireless supporter of the development and implementation of the multistakeholder model of Internet Governance.