The ICANN Studienkreis is an open network of individuals from different Internet constituencies both from the private sector, the academia, the civil society, the media and the government. Established in 1999, the ICANN Studienkreis organizes annual High Level expert seminars on subjects, related to Internet Governance and the development of ICANN. Previous meetings took place in Leipzig (2000), Zürich (2001), Moscow (2001), Salzburg (2002) and Berlin (2003). Conference speakers included, inter alia, present and former ICANN Directors Vint Cerf, Esther Dyson, Helmuth Schink, Hans Kraaijenbring, Alejandro Pisanty, Michael Palage, Rob Blokzijl and Andy Mueller Maguhn.

Originally the ICANN Studienkreis emerged as a network of the German speaking Internet community and was mainly supported by the three German speaking ccTLD registries: DENIC for .de, SWITCH for .ch and .li and nic.at for .at. Later the ICANN Studienkreis became internationalized and worked together with partners from the global gTLD community like Affilias, VeriSign and joker.com.