Moving ICANN's public forums online and removing barriers like travel helped it broaden participation, allowing 1,752 people from 130 countries to participate
Ayden Férdeline / Increment : Tweets: @rossdawson Tweets: Ross Dawson / @rossdawson : ICANN, the Internet domain system's governing body, has until this year functioned with physical meetings of over 1000 people. This year it has learned - with difficulty but final success - to work virtually. An instructive story, well told by @ferdeline https://increment.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Since taking full oversight of the Domain Name System from the US government in 2016, ICANN's legitimacy has rested on its multistakeholder community — which made episodes like the decision to lift price caps on .org domains over community objections so damaging. Until this year, participating meant physically attending meetings of over 1,000 people, a filter that favored the well-funded.
The pandemic forced the experiment: as part of the broader surge in online community building documented since March, ICANN moved its public forums fully online and removed travel barriers, drawing 1,752 participants from 130 countries.
First-order effects
- Participation no longer requires travel budgets or visas, so the people most affected by ICANN policy — registrants, small registries, civil society in developing countries — can now show up alongside the corporate constituencies that dominated physical meetings.
Second-order effects
- A larger, more geographically diverse forum raises the political cost of decisions that override community input, pressuring ICANN to weight public comment more heavily than it did on .org pricing or its contested GDPR Whois accreditation plan.
Third-order effects
- If virtual forums become the default rather than a pandemic stopgap, multistakeholder governance bodies broadly shift from travel-gated clubs toward open digital participation — changing whose voices set internet policy and reducing the structural advantage of incumbents with lobbying budgets like the $2.5M ICANN spent on US lobbying.
The trend: Internet governance institutions are converting crisis-forced virtual meetings into permanent access reforms that widen participation beyond the organizations that could afford to attend in person.