Approved Resolutions | Special Meeting of the ICANN Board | 19 May 2025

Rationale for Resolutions 2025.05.19.01 – 2025.05.19.06

Why is the Board addressing the issue?

The Board is addressing this issue to ensure that ICANN remains accountable, transparent, and effective.

The Board is also addressing this issue further to its 29 April 2024 Board resolution 2024.04.29.04 to defer the Fourth Accountability and Transparency Review (ATRT4) "for a limited time not to exceed twelve months." While the ATRT4 was scheduled to be initiated in 2024, the Board resolved to defer the review to allow for progress in implementing the ATRT3 recommendations, and to minimize the impact on capacity multiple projects running simultaneously would create.

The Board is also addressing the current challenges experienced by the Pilot Holistic Review (PHR) Team, as reported by its leaders in their 13 February 2025 letter, and the continued need for deferral of Organizational Reviews, which the 12 June 2022 Board resolution 2022.06.12.11 directed ICANN to report on within three years. This action takes into consideration next steps for the PHR as noted by the team's leaders in their 24 March 2025 letter, including the possibility for considering the ICANN reviews as a whole, and the possibility for two separate work efforts, one that develops guidelines for the review of SO, AC, and NomCom continuous improvement programs, and another that focuses on assessing the need for changes to ICANN's structures.

What significant materials did the Board review?

The Board reviewed the status of ATRT3 implementation and notes that work is still ongoing on seven of the ATRT3 recommendations, including to conduct pilots the Board requested establishing to evolve Organizational Reviews into continuous improvement programs and the establishment of a Holistic Review focused on assessing collaboration between Supporting Organizations (SOs), Advisory Committees (ACs), Nominating Committee (NC), their accountability, purpose, and continuous improvements efforts.

The Board carefully considered the correspondence from the PHR leadership to the Organizational Effectiveness Committee (OEC) received on 13 February 2025 that identifies challenges in conducting the PHR mandate, and its proposal on 24 March 2025 to bifurcate the work efforts.

The Board also studied the various documents produced since 2018, and related proceedings. The Board referred to the Thought Paper on Proposed Improvements to the Specific Reviews Process, that was released on 11 April 2023 and later cascaded into a set of proposed updates to the Operating Standards for conducting Specific Reviews. The Board also considered the summary of public comment received on the proposed updates to Operating Standards for conducting Specific Reviews, including the feedback from the webinar held on 30 January 2025 and noted that continued community dialogue on operational efficiencies would be useful.

The input received from various community groups at the ICANN82 Public Meeting (8-13 March 2025) and subsequent statements received from the Registries Stakeholder Group (RySG) and the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO), and At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) also served to inform today's decisions.

The Board also considered the public comment summary on the Proposed Continuous Improvement Framework, which shows broad support for the draft CIP Framework, and also posed questions around the details of operationalization of the CIP that are now being addressed by the CIP-CCG.

What is the proposal being considered? What factors did the Board find to be significant?

The Board is committed to continuing to ensure that ICANN is held accountable, and believes the ICANN community has an important voice in identifying the commitments to which it should be held accountable and in assessing that accountability. The Board is of the view that increasing efficiencies of reviews to align with community needs and the maturity of ICANN is essential to ultimately ensure a reliable, transparent review system is in place for the long term. This warrants a community discussion.

The Board held a workshop discussion on 8 March 2025 to consider how to address the issues preventing the PHR from completing its work as well as the pending ATRT4 given the current state of ATRT3 implementation, and the capacity constraints multiple review related initiatives are imposing on the community.

The Board is highly attuned to the bandwidth challenges and competing priorities, and as a result, engaged with community groups during ICANN82 to better comprehend how reviews related work should be prioritized recognizing the ongoing work in this sphere. The Board continued to weigh the community inputs and consider the impact of possible paths forward at its workshop on 3 May 2025, to arrive at its determination on the importance of a community dialogue on reviews and the adjustment of current work areas to support this.

This included detailed consideration on the PHR and ATRT4, as follows:

Pilot Holistic Review (PHR)

The Board considered communications received regarding the challenges of the current PHR in achieving alignment on the intended purpose of the Holistic Review recommendation and designing the review of the SOs, ACs, and NomCom's continuous improvement work while the CIP Framework is still under development. The Board agrees that the CIP Framework should be finalized and that the SOs/ACs and NomCom should have designed their respective CIPs, as suggested by the PHR's leadership, before the PHR designs a review for the CIP. In the communications received by the Board on 15 April 2025 from the ALAC, ccNSO, and RySG, the Board noted a variety of views, including some support for continuing the PHR as is, and some support for organizing the efforts being discussed in the PHR into (a) Continuous Improvement Program areas and (b) considerations around SO/AC structures. The Board appreciates these inputs and has also taken note of the community's feedback from ICANN82 on the difficulty of distinguishing the work happening in parallel efforts.

The Board understands that the community effort on the CIP is continuing to make progress. The Organizational Reviews, which ATRT3 anticipated would be overtaken by the CIP effort, therefore are also not in a position to restart this year, so as to not create even more overlapping workstreams. The Board reviewed the ICANN org's assessment of the status of Organizational Reviews, and agrees that it is appropriate to further defer those reviews until a full cycle of the CIP has concluded. Furthermore, because the CIP pilot has not yet concluded, the Board believes the work of the PHR to develop guidelines and methodologies for review of the CIP would be premature and should only be initiated after the CIP has completed its pilot.

The Board acknowledges that part of the community conversation on reviews and the PHR has centered around a potential effort to review ICANN's structures as a whole, with the scope of such effort currently undefined. The Board will continue the conversation with the community around what such an effort might entail to better understand the need that a review of ICANN's structures is intended to address. The Board notes that while it is not taking any action today on the more global structural issue, each community group has been and remains empowered to look at its own structure and seek changes to how it is organized.

The Board appreciates the work of the members and leadership of the PHR Team for their effort to fulfill the Terms of Reference, as well as their work in highlighting where further clarity is needed to help advance the community's continued work on accountability through ICANN review mechanisms. The Board notes that it might, in the future, rename and recharter an effort focused on designing a review of the CIP after the first cycle concludes.

Fourth Accountability and Transparency Review (ATRT4)

Recommendations emerging from review efforts over the past 15 years have made important contributions to the strength of ICANN in a number of areas. These include evolution of tools and mechanisms (such as refining ICANN's public comment processes); fostering collaboration among groups (such as enhanced communication mechanisms between the Board and GAC); and improving documentation and transparency of its processes and decision-making (such as the introduction of rationales for decisions of the Board, and publication of Board briefing materials). ICANN has grown and matured significantly in this time period, and will continue to do so as the technology and the needs of our multistakeholder model also change. The Board believes that an active effort to develop a sustainable review methodology is a priority, in line with the 2026-2030 ICANN Strategic Plan objective to "Evolve and Promote ICANN's Multistakeholder Model to Sustain Its Inclusive Approach to Internet Governance".

The Board is cognizant that the Third Accountability and Transparency Review Team (ATRT3) issued recommendations on the topics of assessment of Specific Reviews, suggesting that it is time to refresh topics of assessment. The ATRT3 notably tasked the ATRT4 to reassess the relevancy of the Registration Directory Service Review (RDS Review) and make a determination on the future of the Security, Stability and Resilience of the Domain Name System Review (SSR Review). It also recommended that one more occurrence of the Competition, Consumer Trust and Consumer Choice (CCT) Review take place before sunsetting this review topic.

The Board is also aware that reviews have generally consumed significant community bandwidth. The Board recalls the set of short-term options and long-term options that were issued for public comment in May 2018, as a result of Budget Discussions at ICANN61, to help address the overlap of Specific and Organizational review efforts, alleviate the strain on community volunteers, and allow for more meaningful planning. A Consultation Paper on Next Steps on Reviews that suggested the Third Accountability and Transparency (ATRT3) "consider undertaking a discussion on how to streamline Specific Reviews to make them more effective and impactful" was also published in a subsequent public comment period in September 2018. The implementation initiatives emerging from ATRT3 Recommendations accentuated this issue as illustrated in the Registrars Stakeholder Group (RrSG)'s comment (on the Continuous Improvement Framework) that "urges ICANN Org to work with the Community to streamline and rationalize [review] efforts and to ensure that they are constructive and effective without placing an unsustainable burden on Community resources".

The Board notes that Resourcing and Prioritization of Community Recommendations has also been a source of preoccupation. As a conclusion of the ICANN66 discussions, the Board stated in a blog titled Enhancing and Streamlining ICANN's Reviews: Issues, Approaches, and Next Steps, the "priority is to work with the community to reimagine how this important means of accountability can be improved to serve ICANN in the future", paving the way for current discussions.

Separately, the Board understands there have been discussions on how to continuously improve Specific Reviews operations, which were crystallized into the Lifecycle of Reviews project. The Thought Paper: Proposed Improvements to the Specific Reviews Process, that summarized areas for improvement detected over the years, later cascaded into Proposed Draft Operating Standards for Specific Reviews that were published for public comment in December 2024.

Beyond the appetite for building a Specific Reviews' schedule and process that are sustainable and meaningful, and not solely conditioned on a Bylaws calendar, the Board notes that discussions with the community at ICANN82 primarily centered around the overall question of whether ICANN's review mechanisms, in their current form, are still fit for purpose.

The Board recognizes that every review conducted represents a significant dedication of community and ICANN resources, and hears the calls from many parts of the community that we need to look more critically at the questions of whether we are reviewing the right things in the right ways. The Board views this as bigger than the question of "how would we update Specific Reviews" or ways to make those Specific Reviews more efficient. Having the experience of almost 20 years of Organizational Reviews, 15 years of Specific Reviews (formerly reviews under the Affirmation of Commitments), and nearly 10 years since the IANA transition, it is time to explore, as a community, how we can and should think about reviews differently for the future.

The Board notes the suggestion of a community dialogue found in the statements received on 15 April 2025 from the Registries Stakeholder Group (RySG), the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO), and the Registrar Stakeholder Group (RrSG) comment received on the CIP on 17 January 2025 to be a constructive approach to address known issues and to potentially modernize processes.

The Board does not take this continued variance from the Bylaws' mandated timing of ATRT4 lightly. However, initiating ATRT4 while the community is initiating continuous improvement work and is interested in having a broader conversation on the overall approach to reviews may perpetuate existing challenges with confusion, overlapping efforts, and extra strain on resources. We must find solutions to existing challenges to move forward and to ultimately reinforce ICANN's accountability.

The Board wishes to ensure the community is in a position to give priority to this essential conversation and as such, finds it necessary to postpone the initiation of the ATRT4 effort. The outcomes of the community dialogue are important to inform a critical look at how to design effective reviews. The Board, through its Organizational Effectiveness Committee, will work closely with the ICANN Community and ICANN org to establish and report on expected milestones leading to the ICANN84 dialogue, and steps for commissioning additional work following that discussion.

Which stakeholders or others were consulted?

The Board's rationale is based on community feedback received via public comment proceedings, such as the short-term options, long-term options, Consultation Paper on Next Steps on Reviews), and multiple discussions with the community, including at ICANN meetings (ICANN61, ICANN66, and most recently, ICANN81 and 82).

The community groups with whom the Board engaged at ICANN82 on this specific topic include the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council, the Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG), the Contracted Parties House (CPH), the At-Large community, the Commercial Stakeholder Group (CSG), and Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC).

The Board also received correspondence from the RySG and the ccNSO, and ALAC.

Are there positive or negative community impacts?

The Board believes these resolutions will have a positive impact in focusing the collective efforts on addressing the questions needed to update these important review mechanisms. Rather than continuing the current cycle of Specific Review operation and implementation, the Board's action directs these resources of the Community, Board, and org to a single effort to support an effective future path.

Are there fiscal impacts or ramifications on ICANN (strategic plan, operating plan, budget); the community; and/or the public?

The Board finds the effort to streamline reviews-related work and to evolve Organizational Reviews into a more effective CIP is supportive of ICANN's strategic objectives to "Evolve and Promote ICANN's Multistakeholder Model to Sustain Its Inclusive Approach to Internet Governance" and "Enhance Organizational Excellence", as outlined in the approved Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years FY2026-2030.

The Board also believes that the continued deferral of the ATRT4 is a responsible use of ICANN's resources. Recognizing the overall cost to ICANN of conducting this review in the form of community and staff time and related expenses, and the strong community interest in establishing review mechanisms that are fit for the intended purposes of enhancing ICANN's accountability, transparency, and effectiveness, the Board's action preserves resources to support a meaningful community dialogue and follow-up steps, including procurement of expertise where identified as necessary.

Are there any security, stability or resiliency issues relating to the DNS?

While this decision is not expected to have direct impacts on security, stability or resiliency, it should be noted that one of the Specific Reviews is focused on the topic of the security, stability and resilience of the Domain Name System and that the ATRT3 tasked "the next ATRT Review (or any type of review that include current ATRT duties)" with deciding if SSR Reviews "should be terminated, amended, or kept as is".

Is this decision in the public interest and within ICANN's mission?

The decision to convene a community dialogue on ICANN reviews serves to solidify the accountability mechanisms to ensure there continues to be adequate checks and balances in place for ICANN to conduct its mission in support of the multistakeholder model effectively.

The decision on CIP supports efforts already in progress to enhance and track continuous improvement activities in ICANN's supporting organizations, advisory committees, and the Nominating Committee, in fulfillment of each group's respective responsibilities in the public interest and within ICANN's mission.

The decision to conclude the current PHR and consider whether to charter a subsequent effort based on the outcomes of the CIP supports effective use of volunteer time and allows for an informed decision on organizational accountability to be made when this work reaches a relevant milestone.