ICANN has published the list of organizations that will be the first to receive its grants on its official website. The ICANN grant program was launched last year, aiming to support organizations that contribute to the advancement and strengthening of the DNS system. Financing is provided from a special ICANN fund made with the money received through holding auctions in the first stage of the new generic top-level domains program.
Currently, the size of this fund is estimated at approximately $240 million. However, $135 million of it remain frozen: they were received from the auction for the right to manage the new gTLD .WEB, with its results still being disputed by one of the losing applicants, Altanovo Domains. The corporation was criticized for failing to find a use for the funds it received for ten years; the launch of the grant program turned out to be a compromise solution that satisfied all representatives of the domain community to one degree or another.
According to Domain Name Wire, the geography of countries to receive ICANN funding is rather extensive – from the US and Germany to Kenya and New Zealand. For example, the noteworthy initiatives include that of Universidad Católica del Norte in Chile, which is developing a program that would help domain owners resolve domain disputes under the UDRP. It would be interesting to see if the program includes legal assistance, which many domain owners often require in such disputes.
Other projects that have received ICANN grants include the initiative of Seva Sahayog Foundation, an Indian non-profit organization, to encourage universal adoption of internationalized domains, Kenya Network Information Center’s work to improve the management of African country-code domains, and New Zealand Digital Natives Academy Charitable Trust’s project to engage the country’s indigenous Maori population in internet governance processes.
