ICANN86 Readout – Highlights & Take-Aways from the Policy Forum

eco – Association of the Internet Industry and ICANN Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - 17 June 2026

VIDEO | AUDIO | RECAP EN / ES / FR | ARCHIVE | PERMALINK

Speakers: Lars Steffen - eco Association; Gabriella Schittek - ICANN Org; Hervé Clément - ASO; Nicolas Caballero - GAC; Chris Disspain - ccNSO; Philippe Fouquart - ISPCP; Ram Mohan - SSAC; Susan Payne - GNSO Council; Natálie Terčová - ALAC; Sarah Wyld - Registrar Stakeholder Group; Andrew Campling - 419 Consulting

Moderator: Thomas Rickert - eco Association

Opening Remarks

Lars Steffen welcomed participants to the seventeenth eco/ICANN post-meeting readout webinar, describing it as a continuing collaboration between eco and ICANN since 2020. He introduced representatives from each Supporting Organization and Advisory Committee, noting that each would summarize the principal outcomes from ICANN86 in Seville.

Gabriella Schittek explained that the Policy Forum remained intentionally focused on policy development rather than Board business. She highlighted the European stakeholder meeting held alongside ICANN86, where participants discussed EU regulatory developments, preparations for the upcoming ITU Plenipotentiary Conference, WSIS follow-up, and Ireland’s incoming EU Presidency.

She also summarized the meeting’s scale:

• 116 public sessions

• 1,337 in-person participants from 124 countries and territories

• Nearly 550 remote participants

• Recognition of 61 working group chairs

She concluded by noting the memorial gathering honoring ICANN Board member Alan Barrett, who had recently passed away after serving as the ASO-appointed director.

Tribute to Alan Barrett

Hervé Clément reflected on Alan Barrett’s long service to the Address Supporting Organization and South Africa’s Internet community. He described Barrett as an outstanding Board member whose unexpected death deeply affected colleagues throughout the ASO and ICANN communities. Following these remarks, participants observed a minute of silence.

DNS Abuse PDP: Associated Domain Checks

Introducing the topic, Thomas Rickert observed that DNS Abuse Policy Development Process (PDP) 1 had dominated much of the Seville agenda.

Susan Payne explained that PDP1 addresses an important contractual gap. Although registrars currently must respond to DNS abuse involving a malicious domain, they are not required to investigate other domains associated with the same registrant account. The policy seeks to establish such an obligation, making compliance enforceable.

She reported that the working group had made unusually rapid progress since beginning work only three months earlier. Four intensive sessions in Seville resolved many previously identified “can’t live with” objections and completed draft recommendations for the remaining charter questions.

Discussion focused particularly on:

• measuring policy effectiveness through reviews beginning approximately two years after implementation;

• establishing baseline data collection early enough to support meaningful evaluation;

• balancing qualitative and quantitative success measures;

• documenting registrar compliance through normal business records without prescribing a specific format.

Outstanding issues included determining exactly what should trigger an associated domain check. Some participants favored expanding the trigger beyond domains currently engaged in abuse to include domains previously involved in abuse or matching established abusive patterns.

Another unresolved issue concerned what information registrars should be expected to examine during investigations, particularly whether data already collected under contractual or legal obligations should be mandatory inputs rather than implementation guidance.

Overall, Payne described the atmosphere as collaborative and predicted that an Initial Report could reach public comment significantly earlier than originally scheduled.

Chris Disspain agreed that, despite inevitable disagreements, participants from across stakeholder groups demonstrated an unusually strong willingness to compromise. He noted that many initial objections disappeared after several days of discussion, illustrating productive collaboration.

Thomas Rickert emphasized that some debates mistakenly conflated associated domain checks with decisions about domain takedowns. The PDP addresses only when registrars must investigate related domains—not what enforcement actions they ultimately take. He suggested that future policy work should separately consider appeal mechanisms for registrants whose domains are suspended.

He also cautioned against simplistic interpretations of future compliance statistics, noting that more associated domain checks could reflect either increasing abuse or more effective enforcement. Consequently, ICANN’s Office of the CTO was being encouraged to correlate broader Internet measurements with policy outcomes.

Philippe Fouquart discussed planning for future DNS Abuse PDPs covering registrar APIs, bulk registrations, and registry search algorithms. He suggested that some workstreams might proceed in parallel if sufficient staffing became available.

Chris Disspain urged caution, warning that attempting too many parallel efforts might reduce the efficiency that had characterized PDP1.

Nicolas Caballero presented the Governmental Advisory Committee perspective, stressing that governments remained focused on practical, enforceable policies capable of producing measurable improvements in public safety. The GAC continued to advocate proactive mitigation measures and stronger protections against malicious registrations.

Susan Payne also reported progress preparing the charter for PDP2 so that work could begin quickly once community resources permitted.

Thomas Rickert noted proposals for establishing a permanent GNSO DNS Abuse Standing Committee to coordinate future work beyond the current PDPs.

Community Discussion on DNS Abuse

Guest participant Andrew Campling highlighted recent Interisle research suggesting that more than 20% of gTLD registrations during 2025 involved bad actors. He questioned whether relatively modest verification measures, such as email validation, would sufficiently address abuse compared with stronger know-your-customer approaches discussed in recent research.

Rickert acknowledged continuing debate over the study’s methodology and indicated that broader discussions would continue.

SSAD Supplemental Recommendations

Sarah Wyld summarized work on the Supplemental Recommendations Team (SRT), which is redesigning the Standardized System for Access and Disclosure following abandonment of the original, prohibitively expensive SSAD implementation.

The team’s work in Seville focused primarily on authentication rather than accreditation of requestors, including:

• authentication criteria;

• credential management;

• security requirements;

• credential revocation;

• requester authentication workflows;

• service-level expectations;

• registrar evaluation processes.

She explained that a separate ICANN technical group would develop implementation mechanisms supporting these policy requirements.

Wyld characterized the discussions as productive and pragmatic, with participants deliberately limiting requirements to essential functionality in order to reduce costs and complexity.

Nicolas Caballero reiterated the GAC’s emphasis on accurate registration data and rapid access for law enforcement. Governments continued advocating a 24-hour response timeline for urgent requests while seeking improvements to the current registrar verification timelines.

Thomas Rickert noted that the forthcoming EU e-Evidence Regulation would introduce a significant new legal framework for cross-border disclosure requests and emphasized that ICANN policy should avoid creating conflicting obligations for contracted parties.

Human Rights Impact Assessment

Natálie Terčová reviewed ongoing work integrating Human Rights Impact Assessments (HRIAs) into ICANN policy development. She explained that although respect for internationally recognized human rights became an ICANN Core Value in 2016, DNS Abuse PDP1 represents one of the first major policy efforts to apply a formal HRIA during policy development.

At-Large discussions examined:

• differing regional privacy protections;

• risks of excessive data collection;

• burdens on smaller registrants;

• balancing abuse mitigation with protection of fundamental rights.

She invited broader community participation in the open consultation process.

Philippe Fouquart added that discussions on combating child sexual abuse material and fraud demonstrated the need to balance registrant rights against protecting victims and society, noting that these competing interests both deserved careful consideration.

Review of Reviews

Chris Disspain, co-chair of the Review of Reviews effort, reported that the draft recommendations were nearing public comment.

Key proposals included:

• retaining Accountability and Transparency Reviews;

• maintaining Bylaws-mandated reviews while modernizing how they are initiated;

• establishing implementation review teams following Board approval;

• keeping review teams active until Board consideration concludes;

• creating a community-led Review Scoping Committee composed of SO and AC leadership.

He explained that the Scoping Committee would manage review planning rather than determine substantive outcomes, leaving the community itself to decide what each review should examine.

Philippe Fouquart praised the speed of the group’s work while noting ISPCP concerns that some structural reviews might occur too infrequently under the proposed timetable. He encouraged broad participation during the public comment period.

ISPCP Outreach Session

Philippe Fouquart summarized the ISPCP outreach session on balancing security, privacy, and access to registration data.

Sarah Wyld presented statistics from Tucows showing relatively few disclosure requests from security researchers. One notable conclusion emerged from discussion with a security researcher, who explained that investigators often need to determine whether domains share common ownership rather than identify the owner’s personal identity. Wyld observed that this insight complemented the Associated Domain Checks policy work.

Ram Mohan highlighted the success of continuing collaboration between SSAC and ISPCP, praising both the consistently high attendance and the quality of discussion across their joint outreach series.

Thomas Rickert concluded that one practical lesson was that considerably more non-personal operational data could often be shared without compromising privacy rights.

ICP-2: Regional Internet Registry Governance

Hervé Clément described extensive work updating Internet Coordination Policy 2 (ICP-2), originally adopted in 2001 to establish criteria for recognizing Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).

Motivated partly by governance challenges surrounding AFRINIC, the revision expands beyond recognition to include ongoing oversight and possible de-recognition.

Major changes include:

• updated terminology and document structure;

• formal recognition thresholds;

• compliance review procedures;

• periodic audits;

• emergency continuity mechanisms;

• rehabilitation processes before de-recognition.

The ASO expected to submit the revised governance document to the Number Resource Organization later in 2026 before broader community review and approval.

Nicolas Caballero said the GAC viewed the work as important for strengthening transparency, accountability, and the stability of the Internet numbering system.

Philippe Fouquart noted broad ISP support for the revisions and encouraged wider community endorsement.

Universal Acceptance

Natálie Terčová reported continued progress promoting Universal Acceptance (UA), ensuring that all valid domain names and email addresses function correctly regardless of language, script, or length.

She highlighted:

• more than forty implementation guidelines produced by the UA Expert Working Group;

• an At-Large plenary focusing on practical deployment rather than purely technical readiness;

• discussions of barriers facing emerging markets;

• a joint UNESCO-ICANN policy brief on multilingual Internet development.

Implementation guidance was expected to be finalized during July 2026.

Ram Mohan connected Universal Acceptance to broader digital inclusion efforts through the Coalition for Digital Inclusion (CODI). He described work on creating minimum viable language datasets intended to improve AI support for underrepresented languages.

He also argued that Internet resilience should increasingly focus on rapid recovery from inevitable disruptions rather than simply maximizing continuous availability.

Philippe Fouquart outlined proposals for creating a GNSO standing committee devoted to Universal Acceptance, helping coordinate implementation of future recommendations.

Next Round of New gTLDs

Natálie Terčová focused on the Applicant Support Program, explaining that the next gTLD application round includes substantially expanded assistance compared with 2012.

Support now includes:

• significant application fee reductions;

• pro bono legal assistance;

• mentoring;

• technical guidance;

• regional capacity building.

She noted that seventy-five supported applications had already emerged across all ICANN regions, demonstrating much broader participation than the previous round.

Susan Payne discussed implementation work concerning Independent Objectors. Unlike the previous round, which relied upon a single Independent Objector, the new process anticipates appointing three to reduce conflicts of interest.

Because technical problems affected the original application process, ICANN planned to reopen expressions of interest until suitable candidates were identified.

Artificial Intelligence

Philippe Fouquart summarized discussions examining AI’s effects on domain name registrations and DNS operations. While empirical data showed limited measurable impact thus far, anecdotal evidence suggested AI was already influencing registration behavior. Other concerns included AI agents ignoring DNS caching practices and the importance of training language models using Universal Acceptance-compliant datasets.

Ram Mohan highlighted three major AI themes:

• democratization of offensive and defensive cyber capabilities;

• machine-speed DNS abuse requiring equally rapid defensive responses;

• broad agreement that ICANN should actively monitor AI developments before considering new policy interventions.

Closing Remarks

Thomas Rickert concluded the webinar by thanking all presenters and participants. He observed that ICANN86 demonstrated substantial progress across multiple policy areas—including DNS abuse mitigation, registration data disclosure, Universal Acceptance, Internet governance, and AI—while illustrating increasingly effective collaboration across ICANN’s Supporting Organizations and Advisory Committees.

RESOURCES

• ICANN86 Policy Forum — the Seville meeting these takeaways are drawn from

• ICANN86 GAC Communiqué — governments’ formal advice, referenced by Nicolas Caballero

• Registration Data Request Service (RDRS) — the disclosure-request system discussed on SSAD and access

• RDRS Two-Year Pilot Report — the usage data informing the SSAD supplemental work

• Universal Acceptance Steering Group — the UA guidelines Natálie Terčová flagged for public comment

• Coalition on Digital Impact (CODI) — Ram Mohan’s multilingual-Internet and minimum viable dataset work

• Interisle Consulting — source of the gTLD abuse research Andrew Campling cited

• Internet Watch Foundation — took part in the ISPCP CSA/fraud presentation

• EuroDIG — the European dialogue tied to ICANN’s EuroDIG space meeting