ICANN announces the first round of $9 million in grants

ICANN announced that its first round of "grant program" funds have been officially released, with a total amount of $9 million, allocated to 21 organizations around the world to support projects related to the Internet's unique identifier system (including the Domain Name System DNS).

All of this funding comes from the revenue accumulated from the 2012 new generic top-level domain (new gTLD) public auction - a total of more than $200 million, part of which is returned to the community for the first time through a public review process. A total of 249 applications were received in the first round of the program, and 21 projects were finally selected, with a maximum grant of $500,000 per project.

These projects span five continents and cover multiple directions such as DNS security, internationalized domain names (IDNs), IPv6 deployment, and network governance capacity building, reflecting the global Internet community's broad needs in infrastructure and diversity.

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This grant is seen as a positive move by ICANN to respond to the community's long-standing call. Over the past decade, the use of revenue from the new gTLD auction has been controversial, and the launch of the grant mechanism marks the first time that funds have been planned and targeted to return to the construction of the Internet ecosystem.

For the domain name industry, this is not only a sample of public funds redistribution, but also an opportunity to promote the global domain name system towards fairness and inclusiveness. Especially in the context of small and medium-sized registries and network organizations in underdeveloped regions urgently need basic capacity support, this type of financial support is expected to play a substantial role in enhancing the resilience of global Internet infrastructure.

ICANN announces the first batch of grant winners