Summary

  • The executed 2019 ASO MoU names ICANN and the Number Resource Organization as parties, makes the Address Council the members of the NRO Number Council, and delegates selection and removal procedure-making to that Council.
  • The Council's operating procedures fix four phases with stated minimum durations and a seven-day ranked-choice ballot to an absolute majority; the term cycle, the three-term limit and the removal route — 21-day petition, three-fourths support, effect on the Secretary's receipt of notice — sit in the ICANN Bylaws.

Start with the signature block, because it settles who is doing what. The executed ASO MoU carries seven signing blocks — ICANN, the Number Resource Organization, and the five regional internet registries, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC, RIPE NCC and AFRINIC — each with a named representative, under an instrument executed on 7 November 2019 (executed ASO MoU, 7 November 2019). Sections 1 to 3 make the arrangement plain: ICANN and the NRO are the parties, and the NRO carries out the ASO role through its Executive Council, Number Council and Secretariat.

Then Section 4(a) does something a reader may not expect from a contract: it makes the Address Council the members of the NRO Number Council. Not a separately elected chamber, not an appointments board — the same people under another name. Section 4(b)(3) hands those people the duty to define the procedures for selecting and removing individuals who serve on ICANN bodies, particularly the ICANN Board.

Section 4(d) points the other way for the Council's own members: an individual may be removed by that member's regional registry under the region's published procedures, and the region makes an interim appointment if an Address Council seat falls vacant.

That is the whole delegation in one paragraph. The agreement sets the architecture and then pushes the operating detail out of itself — into the Council's own rulebook, and, as it turns out, into ICANN's charter.

The clocks

The rulebook is where the appointment stops being abstract. Section 9.1 of the Address Council's Operating Procedures states that, under ICANN Bylaws Sections 7.2 and 9.2, the ASO is responsible for selecting persons to fill Seats 9 and 10. Section 9.2 splits the work into a General Selection Procedure for an expiring term and an Extraordinary Selection Procedure for a seat vacated early. Both run four steps, reported verbatim as "In either case, the procedure will consist of four phases: nomination, comment, interview, and selection." (ASO AC Operating Procedures)

The General Selection timings are specific enough to be checked. Nomination gets at least 60 days. Comment gets at least 30 days plus the interview period. Interviews run up to 60 days. Selection gets at least 14 days. Before the successful candidate is announced, ICANN conducts due diligence — a step attributable to ICANN, not to the Council.

The vote has its own clock. Section 7.2 provides for electronic ballots on external matters, normally with a seven-day voting window and ranked-choice instant-runoff counting until a candidate holds an absolute majority. The same section states that appointment vote counts remain internal to the ASO.

There is also a compressed track. Section 9.5 allows selection from a prior candidate list, from public nominations or from Address Council nominations; under 9.5.3, Council members must nominate at least two candidates, nominees get 15 days to submit the certification letter and questionnaire, and selection then follows Section 9.4.7.

The half the contract does not carry

Now open the charter. The ICANN Bylaws reviewed here carry an amendment date of 3 July 2026 and make the Empowered Community the sole designator, identifying two Directors nominated by the ASO for Seats 9 and 10 with the designation step set out separately from the nomination (ICANN Bylaws). Article 9, Section 9.2(b) has the Address Council nominate and send written notice to the EC Administration and the ICANN Secretary; Section 7.25 requires the designation to be communicated promptly. Nomination and designation are two acts, performed by two bodies.

Term and continuity live in the same document. Section 7.8(a) sets the regular term cycles for the two seats. Section 7.8(b) provides that a Director, including one filling a vacancy, serves until the next term for the seat begins and until a successor is designated and qualified — a holdover rule, stated plainly. Section 7.8(e) limits service to three consecutive terms and excludes vacancy service from the count.

Removal is the sharp edge. Section 7.11 allows removal without cause through the Empowered Community's Annex D procedures, or after notice by a three-fourths Board vote, and also provides for removal on specified legal grounds and recall of all Directors other than the President. Annex D, Section 3.2 then opens a route an individual can use: a petition to the ASO to remove an ASO-nominated Director, a 21-day petition period, a mandatory invitation to dialogue, and a removal notice available on the required three-fourths internal support.

Removal takes effect when the Secretary receives that notice, and the vacancy is filled under Section 7.12 — which sends it back through the Empowered Community after nomination, with the replacement serving the predecessor's unexpired term.

Put the two halves side by side and the asymmetry is not a scandal. It is a division of labour with a specific shape: the community's instrument holds the process, and the recipient's charter holds the consequence.

Three reference defects, one judgement

Three documentary problems survive the reading, and only one of them is interesting.

The 2019 agreement says in Section 11 that it supersedes and replaces the MoU signed between ICANN and APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC and RIPE NCC on 21 October 2004, together with AFRINIC's April 2005 joinder. The ASO's own page carries the 2004 text under a header calling it outdated and replaced by the November 2019 agreement (2004 MoU page), and the ASO history chronology records the same sequence of signing and revision (ASO history). Yet Article 9, Section 9.1(b) of the current Bylaws still identifies the ASO as established by the 21 October 2004 MoU.

It is tempting to make that a governance finding. It reads better as a cross-reference nobody swept. The supersession is explicit, dated and stated by both the successor instrument and the publisher of the predecessor, and nothing in the reviewed text suggests a different operative authority over Seats 9 and 10. The second defect runs the same way in reverse: Section 13 of the 2019 agreement anchors to the Bylaws as amended effective 18 June 2018, while the charter text reviewed here is dated 3 July 2026. Each instrument points at a version of the other that has since moved. The third is a dating habit — the Operating Procedures page carries no single effective date for the whole procedure, only a 1 July 2020 change to the Board-selection provisions and a last-modified date of 11 December 2023 (ASO AC Operating Procedures). The October 2023 "Kyoto amendments" survive as a redline rather than a clean operative copy (Kyoto amendments redline).

A procedure built on day counts should be able to say which day counts apply. That is the real cost of the third defect, and it is administrative rather than constitutional.

What the tally does not tell you

The ranked-choice ballot with an absolute majority is a genuine constraint: it fixes how a winner is determined. The confidentiality clause is equally genuine: it fixes what the wider community sees about how that winner was determined. A community asked to treat these appointees as its representation is therefore being offered a selection whose evidence is deliberately non-public. That is a coherent design — deliberative candour is a real reason to keep a count in the room — but it moves the auditability burden onto the timetable. If the phases run as published, the process can be checked from outside even when the tally cannot.

If they do not, the outside reader has no vote record to fall back on.

The reviewed text also does not hand an outside party a lever to pull. Neither the 2019 agreement nor the Bylaws creates a contractual recall an outsider could invoke against ICANN. The community's leverage is procedural, and it is real: fixed nomination and comment windows, a defined vacancy track, a support threshold that gives the Council the decisive internal vote, and a removal notice that binds on receipt.

Two boundaries on this reading. A removal petition filed under Annex D Section 3.2 and a published Empowered Community designation vote were not obtained in this review, so the mechanism is described as written rather than as exercised. The rest of the not-obtained list is equally plain: a consolidated clean operating-procedures text with a single stated effective date, any executed instrument recording a change to the 2019 agreement after signature, and the minutes of any Address Council appointment ballot. Those are gaps in the documents reviewed on 12 November 2026, not findings that the records do not exist.

The address community built a door into the ICANN Board with a published timetable, a two-candidate floor on the fast track and a ranked ballot that reaches a majority. The rules that end a term, cap it at three, and turn three-fourths support into a notice on the Secretary's desk sit in the charter of the body it appoints to. Read together, they describe an appointment instrument that is real and a remedy administered on the other side of the table. The entry itself is in the Address Supporting Organization Address Council directory record.