Left to right: Olga Cavalli, vice chair, Chuck Gomes, GNSO Council chair and Stéphane Van Gelder, vice chair. Photo INDOM.

Today was a landmark day for the Generic Names Supporting Organisation, aka GNSO, the place within ICANN that relates to generic top level domains (gTLDs).

The GNSO has been undergoing a restructure for over a year. It is a structure that aims to encompass all those parties who have interests in how gTLDs are managed and handled at policy level.

The new GNSO structure is bicameral, i.e. it has 2 houses. The Contracted Parties House, as its name suggests, groups those entities that have direct contracts with ICANN: the registries and the registrars. The other house is, unsurprisingly, called the Non Contracted Parties House. In it are the intellectual property people, the Internet service providers, the business users, and the non commercial users. In short, the contracted house is for the suppliers and the other is for the users.

The final step on the road to the new GNSO structure was scheduled for today, when a new Council would be seated which paralleled the new bicameral structure. Instead of the previous system, with a single chair/vice chair combo, the new configuration has one chair and 2 vice chairs, one from each house.

All the way through the run-up to today's Council meeting here at ICANN Seoul, during which the election was scheduled, there was doubt that with its new split structure, the Council would ever be able to coalesce around a common choice for chair.