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2026 ICANN Nominating Committee

Open Positions | Job Descriptions for Open Positions | Board and Community Recommendations to NomCom | Timeline | About the NomCom | Getting to Know the NomCom | NomCom Biographies | Committee Documents

Open Positions

The 2026 Nominating Committee will fill seven open leadership positions:

  • Two members of the ICANN Board of Directors
  • One member of the Public Technical Identifiers Board of Directors
  • Two regional representatives to the At-Large Advisory Committee – one each from the Europe region and the North America region
  • One member of the Country Code Names Supporting Organization Council
  • One member of the Generic Names Supporting Organization Council
This is an infographic of The 2026 Open Leadership Positions to be selected by the 2026 NomCom: Two open positions serving a three-year term for the ICANN Board of Directors. One open position serving a three-year term for the PTI Board of Directors. There are two open positions serving a two-year term for ALAC, one position for Europe, and one for North America. Additionally, there is an Open position serving a three-year term for the ccNSO Council and lastly one open position serving a two-year term non-voting GNSO Council.

Job Descriptions for Open Positions

The following documents provide information (criteria and time commitment) about the ICANN Leadership Positions to be filled by the 2026 NomCom:

Job Descriptions for Open Leadership Positions 2026
(Note: You can also click on each job description below to see each individual document)

Board and Community Guidance to the Nominating Committee

Timeline

The 2026 Nominating Committee Timeline has 5 Phases: Phase 1: planning phase runs from October 2025 to December 2025, to include the NomCom delegate onboarding, forming NomCom subcommittees, and confirming outreach events. Phase 2: recruitment & outreach phase running December 2025 to February 2026. This phase includes performing outreach, the community input period, and the application period. Phase 3: assessment phase, is conducted from February 2026 to May 2026 with candidate soft dive, candidate deep dive, followed by reference checks. There is a first intersessional, followed by a second intersessional, shortlisted candidate interviews, and due diligence takes place. Phase 4: selection and announcement phase runs from June 2026 to August 2026. Final candidates interviews and all final selections are completed. Finally, phase 5: reporting phase runs from July 2026 to October 2026, and consists of NomCom evaluations, publication of the Year in Review and candidate surveys.

About the Nominating Committee

The Nominating Committee (NomCom) is an independent committee tasked with selecting key ICANN leadership positions, including some members of the ICANN Board of Directors and the Public Technical Identifiers Board, as well as the At-Large Advisory Committee, the Country Code Names Supporting Organization Council, and the Generic Names Supporting Organization Council. The Nominating Committee is designed to function independently from the Board, Supporting Organizations, and Advisory Committees.

Nominating Committee members act only on behalf of the interests of the global Internet community and within the scope of ICANN's mission and responsibilities assigned to it by the ICANN Bylaws.

Getting to Know the Nominating Committee:

This is an infographic of an overview of the Nominating Committee Structure. The Nominating Committee (NomCom) is responsible for appointing a number of seats to the ICANN Board of Directors, PTI, ALAC, ccNSO, GNSO. The NomCom delegates act only on behalf of the interest of the global internet community and within the scope of ICANN mission and responsibility assigned by the ICANN bylaws. They Operate and consist of 15 voting delegates along with a number of nonvoting leaders, advisors, and delegates that currently serve 1 year term. And no more than 2 successive terms. Terms must elapse before they are eligible to serve again. A non-voting Chair, appointed by the Board; A non-voting Chair-Elect, appointed by the Board as a non-voting advisor; A non-voting liaison appointed by the Root Server System Advisory Committee A non-voting liaison appointed by the Security and Stability Advisory Committee A non-voting liaison appointed by the Governmental Advisory Committee. There are Five voting delegates selected by the At-Large Advisory Committee, Voting delegates to the Nominating Committee shall be selected from the Generic Names Supporting Organization: One delegate from the Registries Stakeholder Group, and One delegate from the Registrars Stakeholder Group. Two delegates from the Business Constituency, one representing small business users and one representing large business users; One delegate from the Internet Service Providers and Connectivity Providers Constituency One delegate from the Intellectual Property Constituency; and One delegate from consumer and civil society groups, selected by the Non-Commercial Users Constituency. One voting delegate each selected by the following entities: The Council of the Country Code Names Supporting Organization.

NomCom Biographies:

Nominating Committee Biographies

Committee Documents

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."