ICANN Board Adopts the FY19 Operating Plan and Budget

LOS ANGELES – 31 May 2018 – On 30 May 2018, the Board of Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) adopted ICANN's FY19 Operating Plan and Budget, and updates to the Five-Year Operating Plan. Under ICANN's post-IANA Stewardship Transition Bylaws, the Empowered Community has the faculty to review, consider, or reject these documents before they go into effect.

ICANN's FY19 Operating Plan and Budget and updates to the Five-Year Operating Plan are the result of 11 months of collaborative work between the ICANN organization, the community, the PTI Board, and the ICANN Board Finance Committee. These documents include:

• Highlights of ICANN Operations, including a summary of changes from the Draft FY19 Operating Plan and Budget.
• An Overview of ICANN's FY19 Budget.
• A Detailed description of the FY19 Operating Plan.
• Detailed descriptions of the portfolios of activities supporting the goals and objectives described in the ICANN Strategic Plan for the Fiscal Years of 2016 to 2020, and the updated Five-Year Operating Plan.
• Detailed lists of projects for each portfolio and project-level budgeted costs.

The continuous participation of the community in the planning process is a cornerstone of ICANN's transparency and accountability to the global multistakeholder community. ICANN thanks all community members who contributed to the development of the budget. Access budget documents for FY19 and previous years are published here.

According to the ICANN Bylaws Annex D, Section 6.2, the Empowered Community now has the opportunity to consider if the following powers should be exercised:

• Reject the ICANN FY19 Operating Plan and Budget.
• Reject updates to the Five-Year Operating Plan.

These documents will go into effect after giving the Empowered Community the time to consider if they will raise a petition rejecting the budgets and/or operating plans. Decisional participants of the Empowered Community have 28 days to bring forth a petition rejecting any of these documents. In this sense, under Annex D, Section 2 of the Bylaws, there is a 21-day period for any decisional participant to raise a petition to reject documents, followed by a 7-day period to obtain support for the petition. For more information on the petition process, please refer to the ICANN Bylaws.

If the Empowered Community does not raise a petition, the budget will become effective 1 July 2018.

What Is the Empowered Community?

The Empowered Community is the mechanism through which ICANN's Supporting Organizations (SOs) and Advisory Committees (ACs) can organize under California law to legally enforce community powers. The community powers and rules that govern the Empowered Community are defined in the ICANN Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws.

Who Can Participate in the Empowered Community?

All of ICANN's SOs, At-Large, and Governmental ACs, can be decisional participants in the Empowered Community, including:

• Address Supporting Organization (ASO)
• Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO)
• Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO)
• At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC)
• Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC)

How Does the Empowered Community Use Its powers?

The Empowered Community has an escalation process to reject ICANN's FY19 Operating Plan and Budget, the FY19 IANA Budget, and updates to the Five-Year Operating Plan. This escalation process gives SOs and ACs opportunities to discuss solutions with the ICANN Board.

Find more information on the Empowered Community's ongoing petitions, and upcoming opportunities, here.

About ICANN

ICANN's mission is to help ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet, you need to type an address – a name or a number – into your computer or other device. That address must be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN was formed in 1998 as a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with a community of participants from all over the world.