Biography | Göran Marby — The Yellow Barracks on Valhallavägen Where He Became Sweden's Telecom Regulator

People meet Marby as an internet-governance executive in Los Angeles.

The job that put him in that world was a Swedish government appointment, and the building it occupied is still the yellow former barracks at Valhallavägen 117 in Östermalm.

On 3 September 2009 the Swedish government named him director-general of Post- och telestyrelsen, the national post and telecom authority.

The term began on 1 January 2010 and was first set to run through 31 December 2015.

He arrived from Appgate Network Security, the firm he had run since 2002, after earlier tours as Cisco's country manager in Sweden and as chief of Cygate.

PTS is not a ministry.

It is the independent regulator for electronic communications and the post, and in 2010 that brief already included spectrum, broadband, numbering and the technical conditions under which Swedish networks connect to the rest of the internet.

The visitor address printed on the authority's own letters is Valhallavägen 117 A, in the old Svea Artillery Regiment blocks that face the park.

The ochre facades and arched windows are nineteenth-century military architecture reused as offices.

The courtyard furniture in later photographs is later still.

The government extended the appointment in October 2015, to the end of 2018.

On 8 February 2016 Marby asked to be released, the same week ICANN named him its next president and chief executive.

Catarina Wretman, then deputy director-general, took over the authority on 27 March 2016 while he prepared to leave Stockholm.

The regulator years are the hinge.

They turned a network-security chief into the official Sweden sent into European telecom coordination, and they are why a California non-profit looking for an operator who had sat on both sides of a licence desk picked him.

Stand on Valhallavägen at number 117 and the yellow block is the one with the long run of arched windows behind the trees.

Photo: Joshua06, May 2018, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons