Summary

  • Jonathan Zuck’s 8 September letter says Claire C. Craig will replace him as ALAC Chair and, under ALAC’s Rules of Procedure, as ALAC’s representative to the Empowered Community after ICANN87 ends.
  • ICANN Bylaws Section 6.3 requires an ECA representative to act solely as directed by the represented Decisional Participant; the representative carries notices, while ALAC supplies the institutional decision.
  • Because ICANN may rely on a compliant notice as evidence that the stated action was approved, each consequential ALAC notice should link to a compact instruction receipt without exposing individual secret ballots.

A succession letter reveals a constitutional relay

The letter is dated 8 September 2026 and addressed to ICANN’s General Counsel and Secretary. It does three things in a few lines. Jonathan Zuck says he will step down as Chair of the At-Large Advisory Committee at the end of ICANN87. He states that Claire C. Craig has been duly selected to replace him as Chair. He then states that, in accordance with the ALAC Rules of Procedure, she also replaces him as ALAC’s representative to the ICANN Empowered Community.

ICANN published the letter on 10 September under “Appointment of Representative to ECA.” A separate At-Large announcement supplies the selection chronology. Nominations ran from 24 August to 7 September; Craig was the only nominee, accepted on 24 August and was selected by acclamation. The announcement says she will take her seat at the 2026 Annual General Meeting after the close of the Board meeting on 22 October. ICANN87 itself runs from 17 to 22 October in Bali.

Those dates prevent a small but consequential error. Craig is the incoming Chair and future ECA representative. She was not yet the office-holder when this article’s evidence was frozen on 20 September. ICANN’s ECA page still listed Zuck as the ALAC designee. The letter records a future handover; it does not move the effective date forward merely because it has already been published.

The more durable point is not who occupies the seat. It is what the seat can and cannot do.

Five acts that should not be compressed into one

The public record becomes clearer when the relay is separated into five acts.

First comes designation. Section 6.3(a) of the ICANN Bylaws says each Decisional Participant acts through its chair or another person it designates. Every year, the chair or co-chairs must provide the Secretary with a written certification naming the individual who will represent that participant on the Empowered Community Administration. The September letter is evidence about that representative identity and its effective window.

Second comes the institutional decision. ALAC is one of the Empowered Community’s five Decisional Participants. It may support, object, abstain, petition or take another action only through the procedure applicable to that matter. Section 6.1(g) requires each participant to maintain processes for accepting petitions, deciding whether to support another participant’s action and notifying its constituents. This is where the substance originates.

Third comes instruction. Section 6.3(b) is unusually direct: the representative must act “solely as directed” by the represented Decisional Participant and in accordance with that participant’s processes. Chairmanship and representative status do not create a personal reserve of institutional authority. If the Chair has one view and ALAC has formally reached another, the ECA notice must carry ALAC’s decision.

Fourth comes administration. The ECA receives and sends notices, moderates conference calls and community forums, and tallies the decisions of the Decisional Participants. Section 6.3(c) requires its members to follow Annex D and implement decisions made under those procedures. These are essential functions, but they do not turn the five representatives into a free-standing policy chamber.

Fifth comes reliance. Under Section 6.3(d), a Decisional Participant’s required or permitted Bylaws communications are supplied by its representative. Section 6.3(e) then entitles ICANN to rely on a properly delivered notice as evidence that the actions described in it were approved by, or are the actions of, the relevant participant, the EC or the ECA. The message is not merely correspondence. It can be the legally recognized surface on which an institutional act becomes actionable.

The chain is therefore: designation, decision, instruction, administration, reliance. A public letter may show the first and the last-facing edge of that chain while leaving the middle difficult to reconstruct.

Appointment evidence is not instruction evidence

The 8 September letter is adequate for the question it answers. It identifies an outgoing representative, an incoming representative and a future handover point. It does not purport to document an ALAC position on a budget rejection, a Fundamental Bylaw approval, a petition, a Board removal or any other Empowered Community power.

That distinction matters because the same correspondence archive contains notices with much greater substantive effect. In 2026, ALAC sent support for Fundamental Bylaw amendments, delivered a rejection-action petition and invited other Decisional Participants to support it. The ECA later certified outcomes and termination states. Every step has a different institutional author even when the same person’s name appears on the transmission.

A representative’s signature can authenticate delivery without explaining how the instruction was formed. A meeting record may show discussion without showing the operative question. An announcement may state a result without identifying the governing procedure or whether a later correction superseded it. None of those weaknesses proves that the underlying decision was invalid. They do make independent verification more expensive than the Bylaws’ reliance rule suggests it should be.

The public record can protect both transparency and secret ballots

ALAC’s published voting guidance draws a sensible line. Votes about named individuals—including elections, appointments, recalls and disciplinary actions—are generally secret, and individual members’ ballots must not be revealed. Non-personnel decisions are ordinarily transparent. Consensus calls may also be used; they need not be unanimous, and a dissenting member may ask for disagreement to be recorded or request a formal vote.

An instruction record should preserve that line rather than flatten it. For a personnel decision, it can disclose the question, eligible decision-makers, method, dates, aggregate result, applicable threshold and any permitted procedural challenge without identifying how each person voted. For a non-personnel EC action, it can usually disclose more: the motion or petition, the decision text, the vote or consensus outcome, recorded dissent and the exact scope of the instruction sent to the representative.

Transparency is not the publication of every private datum. It is the ability to connect a public institutional act to the procedure that authorized it.

A small instruction receipt would close the gap

Each consequential ALAC communication to the EC or ECA should link to one versioned record. It need not reproduce minutes or create a second bureaucracy. It should identify the representative in office on the delivery date and link the annual designation or succession notice. It should state the exact ALAC action—support, objection, abstention, petition, withdrawal or correction—and the procedure version used to reach it.

The record should name the decision question, scope and date; distinguish vote, consensus and acclamation; provide the publishable aggregate result; and link any recorded dissent or procedural challenge. It should identify the notice type required by the Bylaws or Annex D, the recipient, transmission time and public correspondence URL. If the instruction is corrected, withdrawn or superseded, the old receipt should remain visible and point to the new one.

The ECA disposition belongs in a separate row: received, circulated, tallied, forum scheduled, process terminated or certification issued. That prevents an administrative act from being mistaken for the decision that produced it.

Work Stream 2 recommendation 6.1.6 already points in this direction. It says each EC Decisional Participant should publicly disclose any decision submitted to the EC, including the process followed to reach it. ICANN records community implementation as completed in the third quarter of 2023. An instruction receipt would not invent a new constitutional power. It would make the claimed disclosure auditable at the moment Section 6.3(e) makes reliance consequential.

The office can change without moving the source of authority

Craig’s succession is orderly and publicly announced. Nothing in the evidence suggests a dispute over her selection, the letter or the handover. The governance value of the event lies elsewhere: a named person will change, but the institutional source of every future instruction must remain ALAC.

That is the difference between representation and substitution. The representative makes the institution reachable. The representative does not become the institution.

Sources