This does seem to have strayed from the original topic. I don't see any reason not to appoint an Apps area AD. There are three possible outcomes from the process. 1) No change 2) The job of apps AD goes away and a new seat created 3) The job of apps AD goes away and is not replaced Given the way this organization operates I think the chances of (3) occurring within two years are not worth worrying about. There is a broader issue though. Organizing around specialities does not work when everything needs to have real time and security input. There is a charter being circulated for DPRIVE (DNS Privacy). It took me quite a while to work out it was being proposed in Internet area and I don't think it fits there any better than security, transport or applications. But I could make a case for it being RAI. I have come to the conclusion that the OSI folk were right that there is an intermediate layer between Transport and Applications. And that is where TLS and DNS sit (and JSON). So call it Presentation because its the familiar term. But its not the OSI presentation layer. OSI were so very good at making the soup from the finest of ingredients and then throwing an elephant turd in the pot before serving. Yes, the OSI model is junk. But not because models don't have any value. The problem is that the model is describing what takes place in the box rather than the interfaces between that box and the boxes it connects to. If we took an object oriented view [1] then we would define the system in terms of the interfaces. And those are defined in terms of identifiers and syntax (for the layers we deal with). If we define the model this way the identifiers are: Applications - Presentation : DNS names Presentation - Transport : IP Address, Port, TCP/UDP/wev Transport - Internet : IP Address Software defined networking and VPNs can fit very nicely into this model and it illustrates the difference between them. If the upper and lower interfaces are IP addresses then its a VPN. If only the upper interface is IP Addresses then its SDN. [1] Actually defining the interfaces is more characteristic of formal specification languages such as Z/VDM.