ICANN’s Empowered Community How It Works

The Empowered Community (EC) is a unique innovation in global internet governance, created to ensure that the multistakeholder model of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) includes not just broad consultation but also enforceable accountability. Established in 2016 as part of the IANA stewardship transition, the EC was designed to be the institutional mechanism through which ICANN’s community of stakeholders could exercise specific powers to hold the ICANN Board of Directors accountable and to safeguard the principles of openness, transparency, and bottom-up consensus that underlie ICANN’s mission. It is both a legal structure and a procedural framework that transforms the role of ICANN’s community from advisory to decisional, allowing it to formally influence corporate governance matters in ways that were previously reserved to the Board and executive management.

The legal foundation of the Empowered Community was laid in the wake of the transition of IANA functions from the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to the global multistakeholder community. As a condition for approving the transition, the ICANN community insisted on new mechanisms to ensure that accountability and oversight would not be weakened once the U.S. government’s external stewardship role was removed. The solution was to create the EC as the legal “member” of ICANN, a California-based nonprofit public benefit corporation. Under California law, certain powers typically rest with the corporation’s members, and ICANN had historically operated without any. By designating the EC as its sole member, ICANN provided a legal foothold through which the community could intervene in corporate affairs, while still preserving the multistakeholder governance model.

The Empowered Community is composed of five participating organizations, each representing a different segment of the ICANN community. These are the Address Supporting Organization (ASO), the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO), the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC), and the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC). Each of these organizations designates a representative to act as a “decisional participant” in the EC. Together, they make decisions through formal processes defined in the ICANN Bylaws, guided by thresholds of consensus or voting depending on the power being exercised. The Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC) and the Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) are non-decisional participants, meaning they can provide input but do not cast votes.

The EC has a defined set of powers, which include rejecting ICANN’s strategic and operating plans, budget, or IANA functions-related budget; rejecting changes to ICANN’s bylaws or standard policies; approving changes to fundamental bylaws; removing individual ICANN Board members or the entire Board; and initiating an Independent Review Process (IRP) if it believes that the Board or staff have acted inconsistently with ICANN’s bylaws. These are significant powers that go beyond the usual scope of community advisory roles and allow the EC to act as a constitutional check within the ICANN system.

When one of these powers is invoked, the EC follows a formal escalation and decision-making process. For example, if a supporting organization or advisory committee objects to a proposed bylaw change, it can trigger a petition process. If sufficient support is gathered across the decisional participants, the EC formally considers whether to reject the change. This process includes time-bound phases for deliberation, community consultation, and possible mediation. If the EC reaches consensus or majority support, depending on the type of action, it can instruct ICANN to halt the proposed change or take corrective action. Because the EC is the legal member of the corporation, its decisions in these areas are binding and enforceable under California corporate law.

To manage these processes, the Empowered Community has a defined administrative structure that includes a Secretariat, currently supported by ICANN’s legal and policy staff, and a set of written operating procedures. However, the EC itself does not have independent legal personality or a separate staff. Its authority comes from the community organizations that comprise it, and any action must flow from their participation. This federated structure reflects the distributed nature of the ICANN community and avoids concentrating power in any single body.

The EC has been invoked several times since its establishment, though often in non-controversial circumstances. For example, it has approved changes to ICANN’s fundamental bylaws, such as updates related to the IANA Naming Function Review or modifications to the ICANN Root Zone Management Evolution. These approvals have demonstrated that the EC can function smoothly for consensus-driven changes. However, its more confrontational powers, such as removing Board members or rejecting budgets, have yet to be fully tested, though their mere existence is seen as a deterrent to overreach or negligence by ICANN’s leadership.

The existence of the Empowered Community has implications beyond the internal workings of ICANN. It serves as a global case study in decentralized institutional accountability, showing how non-state actors can govern critical internet infrastructure with checks and balances. The EC model demonstrates that meaningful oversight can be embedded within a nonprofit structure without resorting to state control or top-down regulation. This has reinforced ICANN’s credibility as a custodian of the DNS and strengthened the legitimacy of the multistakeholder approach in broader internet governance discussions.

However, the effectiveness of the Empowered Community depends on active participation, procedural clarity, and community awareness. Some stakeholders have expressed concern that the complexity of the EC process may discourage engagement or create procedural bottlenecks. Others worry that the formal powers, while significant on paper, may not be politically feasible to exercise in practice without risking governance gridlock or damaging consensus. These concerns point to the importance of ongoing education, simulations, and procedural refinement to ensure that the EC remains a living mechanism rather than a symbolic construct.

In its structure, purpose, and execution, the Empowered Community represents a novel approach to institutional accountability in the digital age. It is a mechanism through which a global network of stakeholders—governments, technical experts, civil society, businesses, and end users—can collectively govern a shared public resource. As ICANN continues to evolve in response to new technical, political, and economic challenges, the EC will remain a cornerstone of its accountability architecture, ensuring that power remains in the hands of the community it serves. Through its deliberative processes and legal authority, the Empowered Community reinforces the foundational promise that the global internet can be governed not by coercion, but by consent.

The Empowered Community (EC) is a unique innovation in global internet governance, created to ensure that the multistakeholder model of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) includes not just broad consultation but also enforceable accountability. Established in 2016 as part of the IANA stewardship transition, the EC was designed to be the…