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ICANN Fees Drop by Two Cents Under the Terms of the New RAA

By Adam Eisner on June 30th, 2009
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3655992200_2d9c86c8b4Last week a bunch of OpenSRS people, including Adam Eisner, Director, Domain Services, were in Sydney, Australia at the 35th International Meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). One of the big happenings at the meeting was the signing of a five-year extension of its Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) with ICANN.

All global top-level domains (gTLDs) sold through OpenSRS, the Reseller services division of Tucows, are governed by this agreement.

This new RAA has two impacts on OpenSRS Resellers:

  1. The ICANN fee for gTLD domain purchases is reduced by two cents to USD$0.18 effective July 1st, 2009. Pricing in OpenSRS will be updated to reflect the change in the ICANN fee effective July 1st, 2009.
  2. A change in how WHOIS privacy data is handled will impact a very small subset of Resellers who are operating their own WHOIS Privacy service apart from the Contact Privacy that is included in all eligible domains sold through OpenSRS.

We have put together a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for our Resellers, but if you have any questions about the new RAA which are not covered there, feel free to contact us as at newRAA@opensrs.com.

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Holiday Hours for Canada Day, July 1, 2009

By OpenSRS Team on June 30th, 2009
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Canadian flag

Tomorrow is Canada Day and Tucows HQ here in Toronto will be operating on holiday hours.

The picture of Canada’s flag is courtesy of Ian Muttoo. Thanks for making your photo available under a Creative Commons license!

Here’s a list of departments along with any special holiday hours for Wednesday July 1st, 2009:

Department Hours
Technical Support Regular hours
Payments Closed
Compliance Closed
Service Bureau Closed


We wish everyone a safe and enjoyable holiday.

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The Registries: .UK

By OpenSRS Team on June 30th, 2009
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Editor’s note: OpenSRS offers 25 different top-level domains (TLDs) for our resellers. This is the fifth post in a series intended to share information about the wide range of TLDs and to introduce you to some of the available resources that the various Registries provide.

.UK

Nominet maintains the authoritative primary name server for the co.uk, me.uk, org.uk, net.uk, plc.uk and ltd.uk zones. This ccTLD (country-code top-level domain) began in the 1980s with a voluntary group handling the administration. In 1996 as demand for company domains rose, Nominet was created as a private, not-for-profit registry operator. Since that time Nominet has demonstrated their Internet leadership by publishing their mandate and by providing extensive reports such as their Domain Name Industry Reports and Registrant surveys. Nominet is also helping you promote renewals with their dedicated site called Keep your .UK.

Nominet sponsors a Best Practice Challenge, which is designed to recognize British organizations, groups, or people who work to make the Internet a more secure, open and diverse place. Some of the websites recognized are being used in training seniors to use computers, raising Internet standards, and protecting children online. Even the renowned British Library is using .UK. Some of the most famous businesses in the United Kingdom use this domain extension, too, from banks to boots.

.UK Quick Facts

  • There are 7.5 million .UK domain names under management.
  • Nominet is the registry operator.
  • .UK is the third largest ccTLD with 13.6% of the market share.
  • Renewal rates of .uk domains were approximately 70% in the previous 12 months.
  • Domains older than two years have a higher rate of renewal.

Size of .UK

Available Resources

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Maintenance windows for the upcoming week: June 29 – July 5, 2009

By OpenSRS Team on June 29th, 2009
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OpenSRS Domains (Managed DNS only) (revised June 30, 2009)
We have a 45-minute maintenance for OpenSRS Domains (Managed DNS) on Thursday, July 2, 2009. Within this time, Managed DNS customers will experience a brief 10 -15 minute provisioning delay.

Date: Thursday, July 2, 2009
Time: 20:00 -20:15 UTC
Your Local Time: Start to End
Duration:10 -15 minute provisioning delay; 45 minutes (in total) for the maintenance

Service impact:
Managed DNS will experience a provisioning delay within the window of up to 15 minutes.  We will be conducting back-end infrastructure work which requires us to temporarily queue your requests for Managed DNS. Once the work is complete, all items will be processed.

All other OpenSRS services will be fully available. Domains will continue to resolve.

.MOBI:
The .MOBI registry has a scheduled maintenance on Saturday, July 4, 2009.

Date: Saturday, July 4, 2009
Time: 15:00 – 19:00 UTC
Duration: 4 hours
Your local time: Start to End

Service Impact:
Domain provisioning and Whois will be unavailable. Customers who have enabled provisioning queuing will have their orders queued until this complete. Domains will continue to resolve.

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ICANN Update: The Polarizing Issue of New gTLDs

By Adam Eisner on June 29th, 2009
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whirlogo

Cross-posted with permission from The WHIR

Adam Eisner, Director, Domain Services for OpenSRS is in Sydney, Australia attending ICANN’s 35th International Meeting. While he’s there, Adam will be writing regular reports for The Web Hosting Industry Review (The WHIR). Thanks to The WHIR for letting us cross-post Adam’s entries here.

Original article

In my last post I discussed some of the planned proposals for new domain name extensions that had emerged here in Sydney. Although on the surface new domain name extensions are very exciting, the notion of potentially introducing hundreds of new gTLDs has created some polarizing issues. Many of these are being fervently discussed here at the conference.

At one session, a very animated discussion took place around the separation of registries and registrars. Domain name extensions are operated by organizations typically referred to as “registries”. VeriSign, for example, is the registry behind the operation of .COM and .NET. Per their agreements with ICANN, registries cannot sell domain names to the public directly; instead, they are required to use registrars (of which Tucows is one).

But what would happen if a registrar participated in a bid for one (or more) of these new gTLDs? Would registries and registrars really need to be fully separated? Is it a conflict of interest to operate as both? Although no decisions were ultimately made at the conference, the topic was hotly debated, and heated discussions on the issue are sure to continue.

Another issue discussed at length was the interests of trademark holders versus those of the larger Internet as it pertained to registrations of names under these new extensions. While new gTLDs will likely mean more choice, it could also open the window for exponentially more abuse by cybersquatters and other nefarious entities. Securing your company name in the popular .COM, .NET and .ORG forms can be difficult as it is. Now imagine potentially trying to secure it in dozens, or even hundreds, of new extensions. The notion has many in the community concerned, and a team was put together to recommend an approach. The team’s ultimate recommendation was a sort of centralized “clearinghouse” concept: a universal database containing trademark information for registries and registrars to consult. The recommendation was scrutinized and discussed at length during the conference, and it became immediately clear there were many both for and against the solution. This is another issue which is sure to be discussed and reviewed at length in the coming months.

Neither these nor many other issues related to gTLDs will be resolved at this meeting. In fact, ICANN doesn’t yet have a fully definitive timeline for they will be introduced to the market (best guesses at this point is late 2010). However, the purpose of these meetings isn’t to always come up with ultimate conclusions; rather, they’re for the Internet community to come together to discuss major issues at hand and collaborate on solutions.

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