Analysis: The Board Votes

Every resolution vote held by the ICANN Board is recorded and publicly available soon after the meeting. This record gives us a window into the behavior of the Board and the individual Directors. The 723 Board votes that we reviewed include both resolutions passed by the full board and resolutions passed by the Executive Council. We have not distinguished between more and less substantive Board votes but rather included them all in this analysis. We reviewed all Board votes that occurred before 3 June, 2003.

While many of ICANN's moves have been controversial or at least contentious, the vast majority of Board members have never cast a single dissenting vote. Of the 723 resolutions passed by ICANN, 597 were passed without a dissenting vote. Only ten of the 42 people to sit on the Board cast a single nay vote during their tenure. Three of the five directors elected in ICANN's Global Election cast nay votes. Their records are highlighted in the list below.

• Esther Dyson cast a nay vote on the decision not to have full disclosure of all board members' financial information.
• Ken Fockler cast a nay vote on a reconsideration committee request.
• Jun Murai cast two nay votes. He voted against two resolutions limiting the registration of country names in the .info top-level domain (tld).
• Alejandro Pisanty cast two nay votes. He voted against two resolutions limiting the registration of country names in the .info tld.
• Nii Quaynor cast two nay votes. He voted against two resolutions limiting the registration of country names in the .info tld.
• Jonathon Cohen cast three nay votes. He voted against three resolutions regarding the Internationalized Domain Name committee.
• Robert Blokzijl cast three nay votes. He voted against two resolutions limiting the registration of country names in the .info tld. With Karl Auerbach and Andy Mueller-Magun, Blokzijl also voted against the adoption of the bylaws that came out of the reform effort of then-President Stuart Lynn.
• Amadeu Abril i Abril cast six nay votes. He voted against using the current classifications of "Countries or areas, codes and abbreviations" created by the United Nations' Statistics Division. He voted against two resolutions limiting the registration of country names in the .info tld and against the VGRS Wait-List Service. He also voted against two resolutions authorizing the president to enter into the .name registry agreement with minor "non-substantive corrections" (these minor corrections altered, according to Abril, the nature of the proposal).
• Andy Mueller-Maguhn cast roughly 27 nay votes (the number will vary slightly depending on how you count certain resolutions) and often abstained when Karl Auerbach voted nay. Many of Mueller-Maguhn's nay votes involved the introduction of new county code top-level domains.
• Karl Auerbach cast roughly 85 nay votes (this number will vary slightly depending on how you count certain resolutions). For further explanation of Auuerbach's dissenting votes, please refer to his publicly available diary.