You have until Monday, August 10, 2026 (23:59 UTC) to tell ICANN what you think. Do not miss this deadline. Submit comments here. There will likely be no further opportunity to comment on these changes.
Long-time readers of this blog know that I’ve spent more than a decade fighting ICANN’s repeated attempts to carve out special privileges for intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) at the expense of the fundamental rights of domain name registrants. I was a member of the original working group (2014–2018) that reached consensus against replacing the courts with arbitration. I was then shut out of the captured “EPDP” that reversed that outcome, and shut out again from the closed-door Implementation Review Team (IRT) that has now produced the draft rules ICANN published for public comment on June 30, 2026.
I’ve been digging through the draft implementation documents line by line, comparing them against the policy recommendations the ICANN Board actually adopted on April 30, 2023. I’ll have much more to say about what I found (there’s a lot), but one defect is so serious — and so indefensible — that it deserves its own RED ALERT post.