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ICANN Complaints Office

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Overview and Scope – ICANN Complaints Office

The Complaints Office is a function within the ICANN organization (org) that:

  • Provides a centralized location to submit complaints regarding ICANN org.
  • Receives and investigates complaints, collects facts, and reviews, analyzes, and resolves issues as openly as possible.
  • Helps ICANN org build on its effectiveness, and increase its transparency.
  • Aggregates the data from complaints to identify and solve for operational trends that should be improved.

The Complaints Office handles complaints about ICANN org that don't fall into an existing complaints mechanism, such as Contractual Compliance, Request for Reconsideration and the Ombuds (see Existing Complaints Mechanisms Guidance below). This may include complaints about how ICANN org previously handled a request, structured a process, solved an issue, or failed to account for something that may indicate a systemic issue, among other things. To learn more about the kinds of complaints the Complaints Office handles, please visit the Complaints Office Report page.

The Complaints Office reviews verifiable information to ensure recommendations and resolutions are based in fact. It strives to be open and transparent to all stakeholders; to be responsive and accountable to all parties; and to be constructive and actionable in its final recommendations so as to fulfill its core purpose. Above all else, the Complaints Office acts with the utmost integrity in service of ICANN's mission.

Existing Complaints Mechanisms Guidance

For complaints that fall into other existing complaints mechanisms, please visit the Contractual Compliance, Request for Reconsideration, and the Ombuds webpages. To submit a complaint for the most common Contractual Compliance complaint types, please refer to the following pages:

For other common complaint areas, please refer to Information for Domain Name Registrants, the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy, and About ccTLD Compliance.

Submitting a Complaint to the ICANN Complaints Office

Anyone wishing to submit a complaint related to the ICANN org may do so by completing this web-form. When submitting a complaint, please be sure to include all relevant information. Once a complaint is received, it will be reviewed to ensure it falls within the scope of the office, and you will be notified of next steps via email. Out of scope submissions are forwarded and responded to by ICANN's Global Support Center team whose expertise in navigating the entire ICANN org and will get the submitter the submitter with the information and/or assistance they need.

Submissions that fall within the scope of the Complaints Office will be handled in the following stages:

1. Receive, Acknowledge, and Publish
  • Acknowledge receipt of the complaint.
  • Remind submitter that the process is transparent, that the complaint will be published on the Complaints Office Report page with personal information redacted (as appropriate), and that the next update will arrive as per a specific, stipulated time frame.

2. Evaluate and Consider
  • The Complaints Officer interviews ICANN org employees with subject-matter expertise, collects, reviews and analyzes facts, researches appropriate data, and works with management to determine if improvements are warranted and if so—what can be done.
  • The Complaints Officer is independent and will make recommendations based on research and facts.
  • If there is disagreement regarding improvements between the Complaints Officer and relevant department executives, the issue is escalated to the Complaints Officer's supervisor and the ICANNCEO.

3. Response Drafting
  • Once a complaint is fully researched, a path forward is identified.
  • A path forward can be many things, for example: improvements to a process, an educational opportunity, no improvements can be implemented, among others.
  • The path forward is agreed upon and the Complaints Officer drafts a response to the submitter.

4. Response Issued and Published

Resources about the Complaints Office

Announcements, Blogs, and More

Terms and Conditions for Submission to the Complaints Office

Submitted complaints will be handled in accordance with the ICANN Bylaws and the ICANN Privacy Policy. By submitting this web-form you acknowledge that the complaints process shall operate to the maximum extent feasible in an open and transparent manner, and shall be consistent with procedures designed to ensure fairness. Except as noted above, information you submit is subject to being published on the ICANN website.

By submitting my personal data, I agree that my personal data will be processed in accordance with the ICANN Privacy Policy, and agree to abide by the website Terms of Service.

A note about our terms of service:

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."