Summary

  • Samantha Demetriou was elected GNSO Council chair for a one-year 2026–27 term at the 21 October ICANN87 Council meeting.
  • The Contracted Parties House chose Ashley Heineman as its vice-chair; the Non-Contracted Parties House choice remained open in the Council's letter, published on 23 October.

The ICANN87 Council agenda reads like a change of shift at a busy control desk. At 13:15 in Bali, the outgoing Council was scheduled to consider the Latin Script Diacritics policy report: 57 outputs, including 45 recommendations and 12 pieces of implementation guidance. The agenda also carried work on DNS abuse and privacy and proxy services. At 15:30, a second session was set to seat the 2026–27 Council and elect its chair. Susan Payne appeared in the first session as chair and on the farewell list. The handover had a policy docket attached.

The chair ballot was a contest, not an appointment by acclamation in the agenda. It named Samantha Demetriou from the Contracted Parties House and Vivek Goyal from the Non-Contracted Parties House. The Council's 21 October letter supplied the result: Demetriou won the one-year chair term. Ashley Heineman of the Registrars Stakeholder Group became the Contracted Parties House vice-chair. The Non-Contracted Parties House vice-chair was still “to be determined” in that letter, which ICANN posted on 23 October.

Those jobs arrive through different doors. The GNSO Operating Procedures require 60 percent support in each House for the chair; each House picks its own vice-chair from among its members. The result therefore closes a Council-wide choice and one House's internal choice while leaving the other House's decision on the public record as unfinished. The letter gives no vote count or timetable for that last selection.

Heineman is already tied to work on the agenda. She was listed to brief the outgoing Council as its liaison to the implementation team for Privacy and Proxy Services Accreditation Issues, a policy whose 21 recommendations had been under implementation review. That does not predetermine a policy result. It does make the new officer list more than a set of ceremonial name cards: one vice-chair was already sitting in a live implementation conversation.

The elections index traces the pre-vote process; the letter records who won. The useful next document is the House's actual vice-chair notice, with a name and date. Until then, the sharpest reading of the handover is a completed cross-House chair election alongside a House choice still awaiting a public result.

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