GAC's Involvement in the Empowered Community Administration (ECA)
The Empowered Community (EC) is the mechanism in the ICANN Bylaws through which nine community powers are exercised to make ICANN accountable to the community.
The powers allow the EC to:
(i) Reject an ICANN or IANA Operating Plan/Strategic Plan/Budget;
(ii) Approve a change to Fundamental Bylaws and ICANN’s Articles of Incorporation;
(iii) Reject changes to Standard Bylaws;
(iv) Remove an individual Board Director;
(v) Remove the entire Board;
(vi) Initiate a binding Review Process or a Request for Reconsideration;
(vii) Require the ICANN board to review its rejection of recommendations from reviews relating to PTI ;
(viii) Reject Public Technical Identifiers (PTI) Governance Actions and
(ix) the rights of inspection and investigation.
The GAC is a Decisional Participant in the Empowered Community. This means that it has formal obligations under the Bylaws to receive petitions from other AC/SOs and the possibility to initiate petitions.
The GAC may also participate in the conduct of community calls and forums, and support, reject or abstain from escalating an issue and from a collective exercise of one of the powers by the EC.
Pursuant to WorkStream 2 - Accountability Recommendation 06.1.6 ("Each Empowered Community (EC) Decisional Participant should publicly disclose any decision it submits to the EC."), the GAC will use this web page to publish any future "decisions" it submits to the EC.
The committee does not consider "non-actions" (i.e., failure to submit any "petitions to reject") as "actions" for the purposes of Recommendation 06.1.6.