Vittorio Bertola is an engineer, policy expert and activist from Turin, Italy. In the past he founded startups, campaigns, Usenet newsgroups and political parties, served on the Board of ICANN and on United Nations Internet governance groups, wrote unnecessarily complex Perl scripts, and argued online about a lot of things with a lot of people.
He presently works as Head of Policy & Innovation at Open-Xchange, a global leader in open source email and DNS platforms, maker of Dovecot and PowerDNS. There he takes care of research and innovation activities, leading projects to develop and standardize new technologies; he also manages the company's policy and community activities, showing up in places as varied as the European Parliament and the IETF to argue for an open, safe and decentralized Internet. He is deeply involved in the European Internet industry's efforts to promote interoperability obligations for dominant Internet platforms, forcing them to open up their walled gardens. He is also chairing the ID4me consortium for open and federated digital identities based on the DNS.
Previously, he worked as a freelance consultant and as a partner or founder in several small Internet start-ups; he was one of the promoters of Vitaminic, one of the most successful "dot com" companies in Italy, as its Vice President for Technology. He also served for five years in Turin's town council, gaining extensive experience in the public administration of a 1-million-people city.
He deals with Internet policies at the national and international level since the mid 1990s. He is currently a regular attendee at ICANN, at the IETF, at the IGF and in major Internet policy conferences. He was a member of the United Nations' Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) and one of the inventors of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF), where he promoted the multi-stakeholder model, coordinated the civil society caucus and organized the Internet Bill of Rights campaign. He was one of the founders of ICANN's At Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) and its first Chairman for several years; later he represented the ALAC in the ICANN Board. He is a member of the Italian ISOC chapter since 2000 and has repeatedly served in its leadership positions. He also repeatedly served in the policy board of the .it ccTLD. Over the last twenty years, he has been the promoter of a number of online initiatives which made him a well known figure on the Italian and global Internet.
