ICANN has officially announced the launch of its grants program. Grants ranging from $50,000 to $500,000 will be awarded to non-profit organizations whose projects are in some way consistent with ICANN's goals of improving, developing and strengthening the global network. At the first stage, $10 million has been allocated for grants. These funds are allocated from a special fund of the corporation, formed from proceeds from ICANN auctions for the right to manage new gTLDs, the applicants for which could not agree among themselves. The size of this fund is $217 million, and the fate of the funds has long been the subject of fierce debate within the domain community. Their use to finance the grant program seems to be a compromise option that, to one degree or another, suits the majority of community representatives.
Applications for grants will be open from March 25 to May 24 this year. Formally, a non-profit organization from any country in the world can apply for a grant, but Domain Incite, reporting this news, calls it “unlikely” that the grant will be allocated to an organization from a country that is subject to certain US government sanctions. The allocation of grants is also excluded in situations of conflict of interest: for example, if the Head of the organization applying for a grant is involved in the activities of the ICANN corporation in allocating them. The selection, by the way, will be carried out by a specially formed commission from among the corporation’s employees with a high level of expertise in the relevant fields. Well, the final approval of grant recipients remains, of course, with the ICANN Board. The funding itself will be provided to the winners early next year
