Philipp Grabensee was born in Duesseldorf on March 22, 1968.
During his schooling in Duesseldorf, he spent one year at a high school in Los Angeles after receiving a stipend from the German Bundestag to take part in the Parliamentary Partnership Program.
From 1988 to 1993, he studied law and philosophy at the Free University of Berlin and the Rheinischen-Friedrich-Wilhelms-University in Bonn.
He passed his first bar exams in 1994.
From 1995 to 1998, he articled at the District Court in Duesseldorf. During one four-month training block, Mr. Grabensee took advantage of the opportunity to increase his knowledge of international law by working at the Deutsche Bank in New York.
After successfully completing his final examinations in February 1998, Mr. Grabensee was admitted to the bar and has been registered as a lawyer at the District Court in Duesseldorf without interruption since then.
His main work as a lawyer focuses on all types of legal questions that arise in connection with the Internet. To name just one example, he has provided extensive consulting services and represented the first German ICANN-accredited registry for the com, net and org top-level domains (ICANN – Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).
While rendering these consulting services, Mr. Grabensee specialized in legal questions dealing with the registration, transfer and sale of domain names to an ever-increasing extent. After 17 globally active registries formed the company Afilias, which is now the central registry for the (dot)info top-level domain, Mr. Grabensee was appointed to the Board of Directors at Afilias Ltd. As a director at Afilias and a member of the Policy Task Force, Mr. Grabensee worked together with the New York law office of Skadden & Arps to play an integral part in shaping policies and contracts for the new top-level domain.
He has been the chairperson of the Board of Directors at Afilias Ltd. since September 2003.
In connection with his consulting services on questions concerning the Internet, Philipp Grabensee was also a member of the Names Council in the ICANN Domain Name Supporting Organization (DNSO).