Two former ICANN directors want back in

Gluttons for punishment? ICANN’s At-Large Community has named the first four candidates standing to join the Org’s board of directors, and two of them have form.

Sébastien Bachollet, Justine Chew, Maureen Hilyard and Lito Ibarra have all put themselves forward to replace term-limited León Sánchez, who is due to leave seat 15 of ICANN’s board in October after nine years’ service.

Bachollet and Ibarra are both former ICANN directors. Bachollet served as an At-Large appointee for four years from 2010. Ibarra served six years as a Nominating Committee appointee from 2015.

France-based Bachollet is the former chair of EURALO, the Regional At-Large Organization for Europe, and a former director of Afnic, the French ccTLD registry.

Malaysia-based lawyer Chew has extensive experience both on the At-Large Advisory Committee and the GNSO, as ALAC Liaison, and policy-making groups. She also has sat on the boards of Malaysian non-profits.

Hilyard, from the Cook Islands, is a former ALAC chair who has held senior board or advisory positions with Public Interest Registry and DotAsia and ISOC. The NGO she leads, the Cook Islands Internet Action Group, plans to apply for a new gTLD this year.

Ibarra has been in charge of the El Salvador ccTLD registry for over 30 years and has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. He has sat on the boards of LACNIC and LACTLD.

The five RALOs will get a chance to add their own candidates to the slate next month.

At-Large has a complex structure and its electoral system reflects that, but essentially the nominees were self-selected and confirmed by a committee. The ALAC will vote with a view to announcing the successful candidate before April 22.

Poblete’s ICANN board seat safe

Patricio Poblete seems set to serve a third and final term on ICANN’s board of directors, after nobody else put themselves forward as an alternative.

Poblete, of Chilean ccTLD registry NIC Chile, was nominated to continue in the role as one of the two ccNSO representatives on the board after his current term expires October 2026.

Nobody else stepped up as an alternative, so Poblete now appears to be a shoo-in, assuming he passes due diligence. The ccNSO said “if only one candidate is nominated, no election is required”.

His third term would end in late 2029.

Kaufmann picked for ICANN board

Christian Kaufmann from Akamai has been reselected to represent the Address Supporting Organization on ICANN’s board of directors.

He’s the incumbent in Seat 10, having first been picked by the ASO in 2022, but he faced competition this time from Australian Karl Kloppenborg of Reset Data.

Kaufmann’s current term ends at ICANN 84 in October, but will be immediately extended for another three years.

Amazon lawyer DiBiase elected to ICANN board

Greg DiBiase, senior corporate counsel at Amazon, has been elected to serve on ICANN’s board of directors, representing registries and registrars.

He beat Reg Levy, associate general counsel at Tucows, in the two-horse second round of voting, and five other candidates overall, to become the Contracted Parties House selection for Seat 13 on the board.

He will replace Becky Burr, an ICANN community lifer formerly with Neustar, who is term-limited and will leave the board after nine years at the Org’s Annual General Meeting in Muscat, Oman, this October.

DiBiase is currently chair of the GNSO Council and identifies as a registrar rather than a registry (Amazon is both).

He said in his candidate statement (pdf) late last year that ICANN today is too “risk-averse”, focussing too much on its fear of lawsuits, and that it should be more accountable when responding to community complaints.

DiBiase told DI:

I look forward to serving the Contracted Parties in this role and am honored by their trust in me. During the course of the election, my fellow candidates articulated a wealth of ideas on how to improve ICANN and multi-stakeholder model. These perspectives will guide me as a member of the ICANN Board.

The election result needs to be given the nod by the GNSO Council and the ICANN Empowered Community, both of which are usually pretty much formalities, before he can formally take on his board role.

No more Americans as Holland wins ICANN board seat

ICANN’s country-code registries have picked their next representative for the ICANN board of directors.

Byron Holland, CEO of Canadian ccTLD registry CIRA won the seat, which was vacated last September with the abrupt resignation of incumbent Katrina Sataki, who had already been reelected for a second term.

I believe Holland will join the board, after the formality of approval by ccNSO and the ICANN Empowered Community, immediately as Sataki’s replacement, rather that waiting for this year’s AGM as would usually be the case.

Holland comfortably beat Nick Wenban-Smith, general counsel of .uk registry Nominet, by 73 votes to 30 in a two-horse race described by one candidate as a disappointing choice between “two kind of middle-aged white guys and native English speakers”.

The election of a Canadian to replace a European as ccNSO representative means the ICANN board has topped out its quota of North Americans, which could have an impact on other election/selection processes.

ICANN’s bylaws state that each of the five geographic regions can have no more than five voting directors.

Directors Tripti Sinha, Sarah Deutsch and Miriam Sapiro all hail from North America. Term-limited Becky Burr, also American, is to be replaced later this year, but the shortlist of her replacement options are both also Americans.

This seems to mean that the Nominating Committee, charged this year with replacing term-limited European Maarten Botterman and renewing or replacing Sajid Rahman and Chris Chapman, both from Asia-Pacific, has had its field of candidates limited somewhat.

The Address Supporting Organization is also in election mode for its board seat this year, but neither of the candidates are North American.

Two-horse race for open ICANN board seat

A Brit and a Canadian have been put forward to fill the seat on the ICANN board of directors that unexpectedly became vacant last month.

The ccNSO-appointed seat 12 was left empty with the abrupt resignation of Katrina Sataki in September.

Now, the ccNSO says two candidates will face election — Byron Holland, CEO of Canadian ccTLD registry CIRA, and Nick Wenban-Smith, general counsel of .uk registry Nominet.

The election is not expected to take place until next February, following due diligence and a ccNSO community Q&A with the candidates.

Sataki is European, so a Wenban-Smith win would keep the geographic mix on the board unchanged. A Holland win would tilt the balance towards North America.

Both candidates are men, so the result will not go towards balancing the gender mix. After ICANN 81 next month, there will be one additional woman on the board, but this gain will be reversed when the CEO changes in December.

ICANN to be director light for months

ICANN’s board of directors will be down one person for six months or more after last month’s unexpected resignation of Katrina Sataki.

The ccNSO, which selected Sataki and is charged with picking her successor, does not expect to be able to name a new director until well into next year, and the vacant seat will stay vacant until then.

The ccNSO Council said it will open nominations for three weeks beginning September 10, but does not expect to hold the election until February 2025, “following the completion of due diligence on the nominee(s) by a professional firm”.

If the election is hotly contested, a second ballot could take place in March.

After the result is confirmed, it will need to be approved by ICANN’s sovereign Empowered Community before the new director can take their seat. Sataki’s seat could be empty for six or seven months.

The Council said that nominations from the Latin America and Caribbean region will not be accepted because the ccNSO’s other appointed director, Patricio Poblete, a Chilean, is from that region.

Sataki resigned with immediate effect August 23 citing personal reasons. Technically, her successor is to carry out her remaining term, which ends in November, but practically that is of course not possible.

Sataki quits ICANN board

Katrina Sataki has abruptly resigned from the ICANN board of directors.

In a letter last week to the ICANN brass and to the Country Code Names Supporting Organization, which elected her to the post three years ago, Sataki wrote:

I am writing to hand in my resignation as a member of the Board of Directors at ICANN, effective immediately for personal reasons. After careful consideration I regretfully see no other option and need to step down to allow another nominee from the ccNSO to fully commit to this work.

She apologized to the ccNSO for the suddenness of her departure.

Sataki, the CEO of Latvia’s .lv ccTLD registry, had served almost one full three-year term on the board, but had been reelected by the ccNSO for a second term due to begin this November.

The ccNSO is expected to open a call for nominations for her replacement this week.

The replacement would serve out Sataki’s remaining term, which has just over two months left on the clock, though it seems likely they would be appointed simultaneously also to serve a full term of their own.

For those keeping score on this kind of thing, the ICANN board now comprises five women and fourteen men (or 10 men if you only count the voting members), with CEO/director Sally Costerton also due to be replaced by a man in December.

Correction: Sinha’s seat is safe

Last Friday, I speculated that, based on my back-of-the-envelope calculations, ICANN chair Tripti Sinha could find herself ineligible to continue on the ICANN board of directors this November, due to geographic diversity quotas.

My calculations were incorrect, it turns out. While she still needs to be reappointed by the Nominating Committee, Sinha is not limited by the geographic diversity limits. I’ve deleted the article and apologize for the error.

Buckridge to replace Shears on ICANN board

Chris Buckridge will replace Matthew Shears on ICANN’s board of directors next month.

The Non-Contracted Parties House of ICANN, their arses burned by an August 18 finger-wagging from ICANN chair Tripti Sinha, somehow managed to narrow down a slate of four candidates to just one by Sinha’s end-of-month deadline, despite seeming to be at a very early stage of the election process just last week.

Buckridge will fill seat 14, reserved for a member of the NCPH and one of two GNSO-picked seats.

He was one of the preferred candidates of the Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group, which along with the Commercial Stakeholders Group makes up the NCPH.

The CSG had rejected the NCSG’s original preference to reappoint Shears, who joined the board in 2017, for a third and final term.

Buckridge comes from the Regional Internet Registry world. He was with RIPE NCC from 2006 until this June in a variety of external relations roles, dealing with European governments and regulators, which seems like a pretty good qualification for an ICANN directorship.

Sinha had written to the NCPH leaders last month to complain that they had failed to pick a director, missing an April deadline, and demanded they name a name before the end of August.