Summary

  • The ASO Address Council selects candidates for ICANN Board Seats 9 and 10 by an anonymous internal ballot, and the Empowered Community then formally designates the person the Council chose.
  • The ASO's operating procedures classify the resulting directors as Non-Representative Appointees and withhold from the Council any direct power to remove them, placing the ASO's decision on a removal petition with the NRO Executive Council.

On 1 July 2026 the ASO Address Council chose how to fill an open ICANN Board seat. It picked selection from Council nominations, decided by majority vote, for the vacancy at Seat 9. The ASO's own account of that process states it included neither a public call for nominations nor a public comment period. On 15 August 2026 the ASO reports selecting Oscar Robles. On 18 August the Empowered Community designated him, and the replacement serves the remainder of the term through the 4 November 2027 annual meeting (2026 Extraordinary Selection to Fill the ICANN Board Seat 9 Vacancy).

That sequence is where the ordinary description of Seats 9 and 10 starts to come apart. The two seats are habitually spoken of as the number community's representation on the ICANN Board. That is a description of usage, not a quotation from any instrument. Read the instruments that actually fill the seats and a different structure appears: a nomination, a small electorate, an internal tally, a separate designation, and a removal route that runs through a body other than the one that made the choice.

The chain, in the documents' own order

Nomination and designation are two different acts performed by two different bodies. The ICANN Bylaws assign nomination of individuals for Seats 9 and 10 to the ASO Address Council and treat formal designation as a separate step carried out by the Empowered Community (ICANN Bylaws).

The ASO's own selection procedures then place the selection with the Address Council, under Sections 9.1 to 9.4, with an ordinary nomination phase that must be publicly announced and run for at least 60 days (ASO AC ICANN Board Selection Procedures). Openness at that stage is real. Anyone may nominate any person, and anyone may submit public comments. Candidates then face eligibility review and interviews before the Council evaluates them and votes under Section 7.2. Section 9.4.7 requires a selection phase of at least 14 days, with the announcement following satisfactory ICANN due diligence.

A public nomination window and a public comment window are scrutiny channels. They are not a ballot cast by the people who fund the registries, and the difference is not a technicality. Scrutiny lets a community object; a franchise lets it decide.

A ballot with an internal tally

Under the ASO AC Operating Procedures the appointment ballot is anonymous and electronic, held among Council members, and uses ranked-choice instant runoff where more than one candidate stands. Vote counts remain internal (ASO AC Operating Procedures).

Internal tallies do more than withhold a number. They fix where responsibility can be located. A Council member's vote cannot be attributed from the record, so collective responsibility for the choice is supportable and an individual member's vote is not. For anyone trying to reach a director through the people who put them there, that is the first practical obstacle: the choosing body acts as a body, and its reasoning does not travel outward.

The documents' own word for the result

The same operating procedures classify ASO-appointed ICANN directors as Non-Representative Appointees, and Section 8.1 follows through — the Address Council has no direct power to remove a Non-Representative Appointee.

Read that classification precisely. It allocates removal competence. It does not establish that a director can hold no affinity, sympathy or advocacy relationship toward the operators whose registries populate the selecting body. What it does establish is narrower and sharper: the body that appoints cannot unmake its own appointment.

Three years, three terms, and a vacancy that does not count

The ASO states that directors serve three-year terms (Elections). The Bylaws set the mechanics: staggered three-year cycles, a limit of no more than three consecutive terms, and a rule that filling a vacancy does not count as a term (ICANN Bylaws).

That last clause deserves attention. A director arriving mid-cycle begins with a full three-term allowance intact, which matters to anyone modelling how long a single appointment can shape Board composition.

Removal runs through another body

The Bylaws provide an individual petition route to the ASO. Under Annex D Section 3.2, removal requires dialogue safeguards, a community forum, a comment period, three-quarters support within the ASO under its internal procedures, and formal notice to the Empowered Community. Section 7.11 provides separate Board-initiated removal mechanisms, and Annex D Section 3.3 governs recall of all directors other than the President.

The ASO's own procedures then place the decision. The NRO Secretariat informs the regional communities. The NRO Executive Council accepts or rejects a petition and determines whether the ASO supports, opposes or abstains. For an ASO AC-nominated director, the Address Council may recommend how a petition should be handled, while the NRO Executive Council remains the ASO's decisional body (ASO Procedures for Empowered Community Powers).

The two instruments do not sit perfectly together. The general ASO description invokes second-participant support; the specific Annex D Section 3.2 route for supporting organisations and advisory committees does not require it. Which instrument governs, and how the three-quarters threshold is implemented in practice, is not settled by the pages as retained here.

What the record supports, and what it does not

The selection route as described contains no ballot cast by a regional-registry membership or by registrants in that capacity, and no ratification stage. That is an inference from the absence of such a stage in the procedure, not a sentence either document writes. It is enough to defeat the franchise reading. It is not enough to support the stronger claim that registrants who fund the registries never cast a ballot for the seat: the funding relationship, the definitional lines between registrants, members and fee payers, and every historical selection sit outside the material examined here.

Formal designation by the Empowered Community is established. Whether that body independently reviews a nominee, may reject one, or must accept the Council's choice is not, so the stage reads as formal designation and no further.

The ASO pages carry modification dates rather than established publication dates. The Bylaws page carries an amendment date of 3 July 2026. The publisher passages reached this review as reported text, and the 2026 chronology is the ASO's account of its own process rather than an independently verified record.

Where the lever actually sits

Function by function, the arrangement is this. The Address Council chooses the candidate. Regional-registry and registry-community processes compose the Council. The Empowered Community designates. The NRO Executive Council takes the ASO's decision on a removal petition.

None of those functions is a registrant franchise, and the one an ordinary member can influence sits upstream, in who occupies the Council. That is a different campaign from the one usually fought, and it is harder to run because the elections that matter happen elsewhere and attract less attention.

The question worth asking is not whether Seats 9 and 10 are legitimate. The chain is documented and orderly. The question is which body can instruct the two directors and which body can recall them. On this record those are different bodies, and neither is the one whose fees keep the registries running.