The ICANN At Large elections were a long drawn out process. Voter registration began in February and ended on the 31st of July. In the meantime, on the ICANN public meeting in Cairo (7--10 March), the elections were fundamentally changed. The ICANN board agreed to hold direct instead of indirect elections, but only five of the nine board seats reserved for ICANN At Large directors were to be filled in 2000, and a post-election study should evaluate the results.

At the end of the voter registration phase, a Nominating Committee appointed by the ICANN board presented a list of candidates for each of the five electoral regions (Africa, Asia/Australia/Pacific, Europe, Latin America/Caribbean, North America). In a second stage, ICANN members could offer themselves as candidates and get on the ballot, if they could demonstrate sufficient support from their electoral region. ICANN had limited the number of candidates per region to seven, and as the committee had nominated five candidates for the European region, 78 persons were competing for only two free slots on the final ballot for Europe.

Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jeanette Hofmann, two German candidates, emerged as winners from the member-nomination phase. The final election with all seven candidates for Europe took place in the beginning of October. Müller-Maguhn won 52.6% of the votes from the European region, the other member-nominated candidate came in second.