Bridging the technical and the political.
The Internet's hardest problems don't live in the protocols — they live where technology meets money, policy, and power. Layer 9 Technologies helps regulators, policy makers, and business leaders make sound decisions in that space, translating fluently in both directions: deep Internet engineering for institutions, and institutional reality for engineers.
The OSI model, extended — per Evi Nemeth's legendary t-shirt. Read the story →
What we do
Fluent in both worlds
⇄Translation
We make complex Internet technology legible to policy makers, regulators, and executives — and make institutional constraints legible to the engineers who build and run the Internet.
◈Governance & Policy
ICANN, ITU, RIR, and IGF processes — tracking, engagement, and implementation advice for organizations that can't staff it in-house.
◈Technology & Security
DNS/DNSSEC, routing security, standards processes, CSIRTs, and organizational security strategy — grounded in decades of real operations.
The name
Why "Layer 9"?
The OSI reference model famously stops at layer 7. But everyone who has run real networks knows the stack keeps going: layer 8 is money, and layer 9 is politics — where, as one network operator put it, "the most difficult problems live."
The formulation we love best is the late Evi Nemeth's: her t-shirt extended the OSI model with a Financial layer and a Political layer, and it's the version now cited in legal scholarship on Internet governance. Our company is named for her insight — that to truly understand the Internet, you have to work above layer 7.