About Layer 9
A bridge between the people who build the Internet and the people who must govern, fund, and secure it.
Making solid decisions in the often-convoluted world of the Internet and its interrelated technologies and policies is frequently both critical and challenging. Few non-Internet-focused organizations have the resources, time, or interest to develop deep expertise in the wide range of Internet technologies and policies, understand the business opportunities and security risks those technologies represent, or predict the impact of new technologies or emergent Internet-related policy, regulation, or legislation.
Layer 9 Technologies was founded to close that gap. Our team brings multiple decades of Internet operational, technical, information security, business, regulatory, and policy experience — and just as importantly, a practice of translation: explaining technology to decision-makers, and institutional reality to technologists. Whether it's analyzing the impact of regulation, training your staff, reviewing technical documents, or vetting infrastructure and operational procedures, we work at the boundary where the two worlds meet.
Layer 9 Technologies is a certified Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB).
Layer 8 is money. Layer 9 is politics.
The seven-layer OSI model is one of networking's foundational abstractions — and one of its longest-running jokes is that the stack doesn't really stop at layer 7. Network operators have variously proposed layer 8 as "the user," "money," or "management," and layer 9 as "politics — where the most difficult problems live."
The canonical version, though, came on a t-shirt designed by our late friend and colleague Evi Nemeth: the seven familiar layers, topped by a Financial layer and a Politicallayer. Her framing was semi-facetious and entirely serious — no analysis of Internet technology is complete without the financial and political context it operates in. The idea has since been cited in legal scholarship on Internet governance (Richard Whitt's "Through a Glass, Darkly", Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal), which credits Nemeth's nine-layer model directly.
We named the company for her insight. Everything we do happens at layers 8 and 9.
Negar Conrad
co-founder · partner · CEO
Results-driven senior leader with over 20 years of experience in program and project management, strategic vision planning and implementation, talent acquisition, performance analysis, and business process development.
Having earned her Master's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, Negar has worked across for-profit and non-profit organizations, steering multifaceted projects that intersect technical intricacies and policy frameworks — promoting inclusivity and diversity within the Internet ecosystem and building productive relationships with diverse stakeholders across cultural and geographical boundaries.
She has a proven track record of building and leading high-performing teams, achieving consensus among stakeholders, and delivering results-driven programs that address critical challenges in the global arena.
David Conrad
co-founder · partner · CTO
Involved in many aspects of the Internet since 1983, including protocol development and implementation, network operations, and the administration and governance of the Internet's system of unique identifiers.
In the early 1990s, David helped establish the Internet in the Asia Pacific region: an early employee of one of the first Japanese commercial ISPs, co-founder and first Director General of the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), and co-founder of the Asia Pacific Rim Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT).
Returning to the US in 1998, his roles included Executive Director of the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), co-founder and CTO of Nominum, General Manager of IANA at ICANN, senior advisor at Cloudflare, and ICANN CTO (2014–2021), where he established the Office of the CTO. An IETF participant since 1992 and co-author of five RFCs, David is co-founder, partner, and CTO of Layer 9 Technologies.