LOS ANGELES – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) published Revised Enhancing ICANN Accountability: Process and Next Steps, a document that describes the process to examine how, from an organizational perspective, ICANN's accountability mechanisms should be strengthened to address the absence of its historical relationship with the US Government. According to ICANN, this revision incorporates comments from a further 21-day comment period from 6-27 September 2014.

We appreciate and apologize that this is being posted so close to the ICANN meeting. However, we wanted to provide the revised process to the community so it is available for the ICANN 51 meeting.

On 14 March 2014 the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced its intent to transition its stewardship of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions to the global multistakeholder community. NTIA asked ICANN, as the IANA functions contractor and global coordinator for the Domain Name System (DNS), to convene a multistakeholder process to develop a proposal for the transition, which would end ICANN's contractual relationship with the US Government that has existed since 1998. That historical relationship has been perceived as a backstop with regard to ICANN's organization-wide accountability.

ICANN received 17 comments during the 21-day further comment period. Based on the input received, ICANN proposes integrating the originally proposed two-group structure into a single Cross Community Working Group (CCWG), in reflection of the strong community support for the CCWG model. Additionally, given the input over the course of the discussions on this process, it's suggested that the CCWG has two work steams: one focused on accountability in light of ICANN's changing historical relationship with the US Government; and the second, on the broader accountability issues the community would like to bring to the forefront.