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ICANN names its Supreme Court judges

Kevin Murphy, September 23, 2024, 17:02:07 (UTC), Domain Policy

ICANN has finally named the members of the quasi-judicial body that will oversee its highest accountability mechanism.

The names of the 12 members of the Independent Review Process Standing Panel were published by ICANN this afternoon and the International Centre for Dispute Resolution, which manages the IRP, published their resumes.

They’re mainly lawyers and law professors with extensive arbitration experience. There’s one African, and the rest are either North American or European; none are from Asia or Latin America.

The Standing Panel has been a long time coming. It’s been over a decade since ICANN first said it would create one. The jurists were picked by a community committee in January, but ICANN wanted to get them all contracted and up to speed before naming them.

The idea is to streamline IRP, which currently is barely distinguishable from the judicial system when it comes to duration of cases, by allowing ICANN and complainants to select their panel from a known pool of trained, experienced, vetted experts.

The IRP is the final formal appeals mechanism within the ICANN process before lawsuits start flying. There’s been over 20 filed in the last 16 years, and ICANN’s win-to-loss ratio is not great.



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