Robles to join ICANN board

ICANN’s Address Supporting Organization has selected Oscar Robles to serve an abridged term on ICANN’s board of directors.

He will serve until the end of ICANN’s public meeting in November 2027, serving the remainder of the term of Alan Barrett, who died recently.

He was selected from a shortlist of two by the ASO’s Address Council under emergency procedures that than the usual rather lengthy election process, the ASO said.

Robles is very active in the industry in the Latin America region, involved in the creation of LACNIC and LACTLD and working for Mexican ccTLD registry NIC Mexico.

His selection is subject to normal ICANN Empowered Community approval, which is usually a formality.

Former ICANN director Bertrand de La Chapelle dies

Former ICANN director Bertrand de La Chapelle has died unexpectedly, according to friends and colleagues paying tribute to his life this week.

La Chapelle served on the ICANN board between 2010 and 2013, at the behest of the Nominating Committee, during a period when directors were navigating ICANN through the tricky dual problems of approving the new gTLD program and the then-controversial .xxx TLD.

Even after his directorship ended, he was a frequent, vocal, eloquent, often flamboyant, and arguably iconic presence at ICANN public meetings.

La Chapelle came from the worlds of technology and diplomacy, representing his native France during the World Summit on the Information Society and sitting for a period as vice-chair of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee.

Friends and colleagues on social media variously described him as “thoughtful”, “charming”, “purposeful”, “witty” and “inspirational”, and expressed their shock at his sudden loss.

Fifty-six orgs get 85% off their gTLD fees

ICANN has revealed the final statistics for its Applicant Support Program, the deal that sees non-profits and others get up to 85% off their $227,000 new gTLD application fees.

The number of qualified, fully confirmed applicants topped out at 56, from 78 submitted applications. Four were withdrawn, three were found ineligible for support, and 15 were “terminated” for failing to pull the final trigger before the August 12 cut-off date.

The major question arising from the final stats is whether ICANN met its ambition of bringing in more applicants from less-developed economies, particularly those in the Global South or indigenous peoples.

Only one application was approved from the Latin America and Caribbean region — which includes every nation in the western hemisphere south of the US-Mexico border. That applicant fit into the “Micro/Small Business From a Less-Developed Economy” category.

That’s the kind of statistic likely to raise eyebrows when ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee meets to dissect the results of the program.

There was also only one approved applicant in the “Indigenous/Tribal People’s Organization” category. That applicant came from the Asia-Pacific region, which could indicate any number of minority ethnic groups in dozens of countries.

Africa fared a little better, with six small businesses and one non-profit getting approved for the discounts. Asia-Pac had a total of 30, split almost evenly between for-profit and non-profit.

North America, a region covering not much more than the USA and Canada, accounted for 14 approved applications, while Europe accounted for four.

The final stats of the ASP can be found here. The full details of the applicants and their strings will come on Reveal Day in October.

Harper replaces Deutsch on ICANN board

ICANN’s Nominating Committee has revealed its picks for ICANN’s board of directors and it looks like they will be considerably less controversial than last year’s round.

Sarah Deutsch is leaving the board at the end of October’s annual general meeting at the conclusion of her maximum third three-year term. She is designated as North American for ICANN’s geographic diversity quotas.

She’s being replaced by Barbados-born, Berlin-based, UK-educated, Niel Harper, a security expert who runs an Estonian consulting agency.

Apparently a real citizen of the world, he nevertheless represents the Latin America and Caribbean region.

ICANN said he has been chief information security officer for the likes of Interpol and the United Nations Office for Project Services, among other roles around the world.

NomCom also announced that Kenyan tech policy expert Catherine Adeya is retaining her seat for a second three-year term.

Last year’s NomCom selection caused far more friction, with board chair Tripti Sinha publicly criticizing its members for essentially firing her vice-chair.

But the NomCom-appointed gender mix, something that often comes in for scrutiny, will clearly change this year.

The current board has five female directors out of a nominal 20 total. All five are voting members (as opposed to the four non-voting liaisons) and all five were appointed by NomCom, rather than a stakeholder group.

Obviously, Deutsch’s retirement and replacement with a male director would change that mix to a quarter of voting directors and a fifth of total directors being female, lower than the typical ICANN participant ratio.

However, one seat is currently unoccupied due to the recent death of Alan Barrett, an Address Supporting Organization appointee, and it’s not yet clear who will replace him.

ICANN board seat up for grabs

ICANN’s Country Code Names Supporting Organization has put out a call for nominations for candidates to potentially replace one of its current directors on the ICANN board next year.

It’s the seat currently held by Byron Holland of .ca registry CIRA. His first term on the board is up at next year’s AGM — the ccNSO starts its election process well in advance — and he’s eligible to be nominated again for another term.

The only people not eligible are those hailing from the Latin America and Caribbean region. That’s because the ccNSO has geographical diversity rules and its other director, Patricio Poblete, is from Chile.

Nominations must be submitted before the end of August 13, with voting taking place in November. A formal appointment will be made before the end of April 30 next year, with the successful candidate taking their seat at the end of the ICANN 90 public meeting in early November 2027.

Only representatives of ccTLD managers that are members of the ccNSO may be nominated. Further details have been published here.

ICANN rules could hamper agentic AI domain regs

Bulk registration of domain names is likely to become more difficult under policy proposals being considered in ICANN, potentially limiting the potential of agentic AI.

The Generic Names Supporting Organization is in the very early stages of a Policy Development Process that aims to “introduce friction” into bulk registration shopping carts for untrusted registrants.

The PDP was initially conceived last year as targeting API-based registrations, which are believed to be often used by Bad Guys to bulk-register domains for abusive purposes like malware and spam.

But the first version of the draft charter that will govern the PDP is now using “technology neutral” language, recognizing that APIs may not be as relevant in future. Bots and agentic AI are not directly mentioned, but it’s clearly what the authors have in mind.

The charter states:

This PDP would seek to introduce a requirement to put safeguards in place to ensure that registrants, particularly new or untrusted accounts, cannot immediately access domain name registrations at scale until they have demonstrated basic trustworthiness.

Quite how the limits would be put in place, what “at scale” means numerically, and how “trustworthiness” would be defined and earned, are all issues that would have to be hashed out by the PDP working group.

Whatever rules are created would be binding on all ICANN-accredited registrars and their resellers.

The PDP working group has yet to be created, and it seems the absolute earliest any agreed policy could be approved by ICANN would be the end of next year, with the rules coming into effect perhaps the following year.

The PDP is set to be the second of the Domain Abuse Mitigation efforts that began last year under pressure from governments and others and studies such as ICANN’s INFERMAL, which discovered that registrars with freely available APIs were far more likely to be abused by ne’er-do-wells.

Harassment down, bitchiness up at ICANN

ICANN’s Ombuds dealt with 50% more cases in its last-reported year, with most of the growth attributable to community members who just can’t seem to get along.

In a recently published annual report (pdf), covering the period to the end of June 2025 (yes, it really is published a whole year after the fact), the Ombuds said that it opened 248 tickets in the year.

But 212 of those — basically the same as the previous year — were ruled “out of scope”, perhaps because they were requests for information or help rather that outright complaints.

The remaining 36, up from 24 in the prior year, were ruled “in-scope”. Eight of those cases were complaints.

The Ombuds splits cases into two buckets — “unfairness” and “interpersonal and relational”. Unfairness cases were flat at 16, but down as a percentage from 67% to 44% due to the interpersonal category growing from seven cases to 20.

The interpersonal bucket refers to how community members interact in their working groups and such. It covers harassment, conflict, uncivil language and behavior.

Combined, cases concerning these behaviors accounted for 56% of the total, but the Ombuds reported that only two of those were at the level of claims of harassment.

ICANN lays out new rules for navel-gazing

ICANN is set to cut back on the amount of navel-gazing it carries out, dramatically scaling back how often it reviews its own structure and performance.

The community’s unashamedly meta “Review of Reviews” has produced fruit on schedule, with a set of principles set to be opened for discussion at the ICANN 86 meeting in Seville, Spain which kicks off this weekend.

The Cross Community Group that came up with the new framework would see some reviews that are currently mandated by ICANN’s bylaws eliminated altogether and others put on a substantially longer cycle.

The CCG is recommending that only two reviews are mandatory, the Accountability & Transparency Review, which would occur every five years, and an ICANN Structural Review which would run every 15 years instead of the current five.

The Registration Directory Service Review, which according to the bylaws has to review Whois policy every five years, does not appear to feature in the new recommendations. Either does the Competition, Consumer Trust and Consumer Choice Review.

The five-yearly Security, Stability, and Resiliency Review would now be treated as an “On-Demand Review”, a new category of review that can be called for by the community if a very high voting threshold is met.

The proposals already have their detractors among the community’s constituency groups.

The Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group has concerns that they would favor highly resourced interest groups at the expense of marginalized communities, for example, while the Intellectual Property Constituency believes eliminating some of the reviews poses a risk of DNS abuse and IP infringement.

There will be a session on the proposals in Seville on Monday.

Surprising nobody, ICANN calls off Oman meeting

The bad news: ICANN has cancelled its meeting in Oman this October. The good news: you’re all going to Bali instead!

The ICANN 87 Annual General Meeting will now take place at the conference center attached to The Westin Resort Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia, from October 17 to 22. Those are the same dates as the scheduled meeting in Muscat.

While ICANN scrupulously avoided explicitly laying the blame at the feet of Donald Trump, from whom the Org has been cowering since his second term as US president began, the relocation of the AGM is not unexpected and certainly due to the ongoing US-Israeli war on Iran.

While the timing may be coincidental, ICANN’s announcement came less than a week after an increasingly unpredictable Trump threatened to bomb Oman, which has been acting largely as a neutral mediator to date.

But ICANN merely said:

The decision to relocate the meeting was made in consultation with the meeting hosts and local partners in Oman, with a shared focus on ensuring that the AGM can proceed on schedule and support broad global participation.

…

Accessibility, travel reliability, and the ability to participate, both in person and online, are essential to its success. In light of recent developments affecting regional airspace, ICANN has taken this step now to provide certainty for participants and ensure the meeting can move forward as planned.

Bali is of course a popular tourist destination in the Asia-Pacific region — and the beachfront Westin looks gorgeous — it is a long slog for ICANN participants from North American and Europe. But the risk of accidentally getting shot down is much reduced.

It’s the second time in less than a year ICANN has postponed a meeting in Oman due to regional instability.

ICANN director and African internet pioneer Barrett dies

Alan Barrett, a member of ICANN’s board of directors and an internet pioneer in his home of South Africa has died, according to ICANN.

The Org said that Barrett died of recently-diagnosed cancer yesterday, May 28. An online memorial is being planned, but his family have requested privacy in the meantime, ICANN said.

Barrett was involved in setting up the first internet connections to universities in South Africa and the launch of the first commercial ISP there in the 1990s, according to his biography.

He also served as CEO of AFRINIC, the Regional Internet Registry for Africa, from 2015 to 2019.

“Alan was a kind man, who listened to others,” ICANN CEO Kurt Lindqvist wrote on social media. “When Alan spoke you listened as he was always well read, balanced and would suggest a path forward on thorny issues.”

He was the Address Supporting Organization’s two-time appointment to the ICANN board and his second term was due to expire at the conclusion of the 2027 Annual General Meeting.