ICANN 83

Event
Process	ICANN
Date	Jun. 9, 2025 – Jun. 12, 2025
Region	EUR
Country	Czechia
City	Prague
Venue	Prague Congress Center
← ICANN 82 ICANN 84 →

ICANN 83 was ICANN's 83rd Public Meeting and the 2025 Policy Forum. It was held in Prague, Czech Republic, from June 9-12, 2025 at the Prague Congress Centre, with the support of local host CZ.NIC, operator of .cz. It was the second ICANN Public Meeting held in Prague, following ICANN 44 in 2012.

Overview

ICANN 83 took place during June 9-12, 2025 as a four-day Policy Forum focused on ongoing policy development and advisory work rather than ceremonial or Board-centric activities. Prep Week webinars were held on May 27-28 2025. According to ICANN communications, the meeting was framed against several broader milestones:

• Preparations for the 20-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society outcomes (WSIS+20), including how the multistakeholder model would be presented and defended in intergovernmental venues.
• Continued work on the New gTLD Program: Next Round, including Applicant Support, and publication of the draft Applicant Guidebook (AGB) for Public Comment in May 2025.
• Intensified focus on DNS Abuse and the effectiveness of contractual and non-contractual tools to mitigate it.
• Cross-community reflection on Universal Acceptance, IDNs, and multilingualism.
• Internal process reviews such as the "How We Meet" initiative to adjust the structure of ICANN Public Meetings.

The official schedule was published on May 19, 2025 on ICANN's Sched instance.

GNSO Council public meeting at ICANN 83

The GNSO Council held its public meeting on June 11, 2025. The agenda combined status updates on key small-team efforts (Board readiness, registration data accuracy, DNS abuse), a broader discussion on ICANN-wide reviews, and an open mic where community members highlighted priorities such as the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP).

Board Readiness Small Team

The Council received a detailed update from the Board Readiness Small Team, which had been examining how the ICANN Board has handled several sets of GNSO policy recommendations, including Registration Data (Phases 1 and 2) and the New gTLD Subsequent Procedures (SubPro). The goal was not to re-litigate specific Board decisions, but to improve how future GNSO policy development is framed and documented so that recommendations are more robust when they reach the Board.

The Small Team reported on its interviews with Board members focused on how and why specific GNSO recommendations were accepted, rejected, or modified, including issues such as wording problems, perceived bylaw conflicts, cost concerns, and implementation feasibility.

The discussion emphasized extracting “lessons learned” that could be translated into practical tools for future GNSO work, for example, checklists for PDP chartering, guidance on anticipating GAC and ALAC advice, and ways to structure PDP outputs so that the Board can act more coherently on them.

Councilors highlighted the value of using these findings in future strategic planning sessions (e.g. the Council Strategic Planning Session) and in the SCCI’s work on PDP-related continuous improvement.

Registration Data Accuracy Small Team

The Registration Data Accuracy Small Team presented a progress update based on work that included analysis of the INFERMAL study and documentation from registrars on current validation practices.

The Small Team was exploring options to improve outcomes in handling accuracy complaints, with particular attention to shortening the time window for registrants to respond to accuracy-related notices as a way to reduce the window of malicious activity associated with inaccurate contact data.

Councilors from registrar and non-commercial communities flagged tensions between, on the one hand, pressure to shorten response timelines to reduce abuse and, on the other, concerns about due process and privacy impacts. The update stressed that the INFERMAL study is used as one input rather than definitive evidence and that any recommendations must respect privacy and human-rights considerations.

The Small Team was working towards preliminary recommendations that could lead to further Council deliberations or future GNSO policy work (for example, a scoped PDP or new guidance to existing policies).

DNS Abuse Small Team

The DNS Abuse Small Team reported on its ongoing effort to compile and analyze a comprehensive “gap matrix” mapping DNS abuse-related issues across ICANN policies, contracts, and community work.

During ICANN 83 the team used discussions in Prague, including the CPH DNS Abuse Community Update, ALAC’s DNS abuse plenary, and GAC-related sessions, to refine the list of gaps and source documents and to solicit further input from stakeholder groups and advisory committees.

The work plan foresaw structuring and clustering identified gaps, then prioritizing them and feeding the result into a GNSO issue report. That issue report could in turn form the basis for one or more PDPs or other policy mechanisms, depending on the scope and community bandwidth.

The Council discussed whether DNS Abuse issues should be grouped into a single issue report or split into several, and how to balance proactive and reactive measures while being mindful of potential human-rights implications and the limits of policy as a tool for every identified gap.

Latin Script Diacritics PDP

The Latin Script Diacritics (LD) PDP Working Group held two working sessions at ICANN 83, continuing its early-stage deliberations under a Council-approved project plan. The PDP addresses the situation where an ASCII-based gTLD string (for example, a Latin string without accents) and its Latin-diacritic version are not treated as variants of each other under existing rules.

The core policy question is how to create a mechanism that allows a single registry operator to operate both the base ASCII gTLD and the Latin-script gTLD with diacritics in circumstances where they are closely related but not formally classified as variants.

Before ICANN 83, the GNSO Council had requested and received a Preliminary Issue Report on Latin Script Diacritics, which went out for Public Comment in mid-2024 and returned strong support (41 submissions) for initiating a PDP. The Council initiated the PDP on November 13, 2024 and adopted the charter in December 2024.

At ICANN 82 the working group held its first work session; by ICANN 83 it was still working through charter questions to build a shared understanding of the technical and policy issues and to prepare its preliminary recommendations and Initial Report.

The ICANN 83 working sessions were used to test early thinking on possible policy approaches and to plan the path towards an Initial Report for Public Comment.

ICANN Reviews

Under the agenda item on ICANN reviews, the Council discussed information from SO/AC leadership discussions and the ICANN Board’s deferral of the next Accountability and Transparency Review (ATRT4) in favor of a possible “review of reviews” and related bylaw amendments.

Councilors debated whether deferring ATRT4 risks non-compliance with existing bylaw timelines versus the benefits of rationalizing the “pile-up” of overlapping organizational and structural reviews.

Several interventions stressed that the community should treat any bylaw changes as a community-driven process, with the Empowered Community playing a central role, and that the opportunity should be used to make reviews more fit-for-purpose and better synchronised with policy and implementation cycles.

From a GNSO perspective, participants linked the discussion to the Council’s own continuous-improvement efforts and to the need to ensure that review outcomes can be implemented in a timely fashion rather than simply accumulating new obligations.

EPDP on IDNs and IDNs IRT

The Expedited Policy Development Process on Internationalized Domain Names (EPDP-IDNs) had completed both its Phase 1 and Phase 2 work prior to ICANN 83, and the focus in Prague was on implementation through the IDNs sub-track of the New gTLD Subsequent Procedures IRT.

The EPDP-IDNs addressed the lack of an agreed definition of variant TLDs and a mechanism for variant management. The work was structured into two phases: Phase 1 on top-level gTLD definition and variant management; Phase 2 on second-level variant management.

The GNSO Council approved the Phase 1 Final Report (69 Outputs) on December 21, 2023; the ICANN Board subsequently adopted 56 of 58 Phase 1 recommendations by September 7, 2024.

The Council later approved all 20 Phase 2 Outputs (14 recommendations and 6 implementation guidance) on November 13, 2024 and transmitted them to the Board in December 2024.

At ICANN 83, the EPDP working group itself did not meet. Instead, an IDNs IRT sub-track session was held on June 10 to advance implementation issues and align IDN variant management with the broader SubPro implementation timeline for the Next Round.

World Summit on the Information Society

Internationalized Domain Name

Generic Names Supporting Organization. Develops and recommends to the Board substantive policies relating to generic top-level domains and other responsibilities set forth in the Bylaws (ICANN Bylaws).

Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy

Governmental Advisory Committee. Considers and provides advice on the activities of ICANN as they relate to concerns of governments, particularly matters where there may be an interaction between ICANN's policies and various laws and international agreements or where they may affect public policy issues (ICANN Bylaws).

At-Large Advisory Committee. Considers and provides advice on the activities of ICANN related to the interests of individual Internet users (ICANN Bylaws). Not to be confused with the Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group.

Policy Development Process

Contracted Parties House. Includes the Registries Stakeholder Group and the Registrars Stakeholder Group (ICANN Bylaws).

Policy Development Process

American Standard Code for Information Interchange

Generic Top-level Domain

Expedited Policy Development Process

Top-Level Domain

Internationalized Domain Name