Blog Articles

ICANN83 policy recap
The ICANN83 meeting in Prague, Czechia, brought the Community together for four days of policy-focused sessions. Contrasted with other ICANN meetings, which include a Public Forum, Annual General Meeting for the Board, and other more business-oriented sessions, the Policy forum centers on current policy and implementation work, so it’s usually the most jam-packed for the […]

ICANN82 Recap
ICANN82 was hosted in Seattle, which is lovely in mid-March. The crisp Pacific Northwest coast offers beautiful views and Seattle has a whole “underground city”—it’s well worth a visit. ICANN’s new CEO Kurtis Lindqvist participated throughout the week-long meeting. With his technical background and pragmatic approach, Kurtis offers more than 30 years of experience (and […]

ICANN81 recap
ICANN81, hosted in Istanbul, Türkiye, brought us together both in person and virtually for a week of working meetings and presentations. Before we get into the specific policy work updates, we want to highlight two important discussions happening within the ICANN community right now. Perhaps closest to our cow-print hearts, ICANN Registrars and Registries (together, […]

Transfer Policy changes: what do you think?
ICANN’s Transfer Policy Review Working Group has been hard at work since 2021, as we’ve discussed in our ICANN Policy series. The group’s Initial Report is now out for public comment and Tucows is preparing to submit our input by the September 30th deadline. This post highlights some of the most significant updates being recommended […]

ICANN80 Recap
ICANN80 took place in Kigali, Rwanda, with four days of policy meetings and a beautiful conference center. There is an exciting piece of ICANN news to share before we dive into highlights from this series of policy-focused meetings: the search has concluded! Kurt Erik “Kurtis” Lindqvist has been selected as ICANN Board President and CEO. […]

ICANN79 recap
ICANN79 was held in beautiful Puerto Rico, where the windowless, extremely air-conditioned conference center provided sometimes-welcome relief from the bright sun, heat, and humidity of San Juan. The sessions covered a broad variety of policy and operational topics, and we’ll look at a few of these below. DNS Abuse Amendments The Amendments to the Registrar […]

ICANN78 Recap: DNS Abuse, registration data, new gTLDs, and Transfer Policy updates
Hamburg is beautiful this time of year: cold and rainy enough that ICANN78 attendees didn’t mind being cooped up inside for meetings, with clear warm stretches that allowed for a bit of sightseeing. If I’m being completely honest, my personal highlight was visiting the Miniature Wonderland, but I was also glad to take part in […]

ICANN76 recap
The ICANN76 conference in Cancun wrapped up on March 16 and, while the setting might seem odd for a conference on policy and internet governance, it was a productive few days. In her opening remarks, ICANN Board Chair Tripti Sinha spoke about this time as an “inflection point.” ICANN’s role in managing the domain name […]

What do domain status codes mean?
When you do a Whois lookup on a domain, the results include a lot of information. It’ll look something like the image below. Most of the fields are pretty self-explanatory, but the meaning of the “Domain Status” field values isn’t always so clear. In this post, we’ll explain what the various status codes mean, so […]

ICANN74 recap
If we’ve known each other or worked together for any significant period of time, you know that I have a strong sense of FOMOW—fear of missing out on work. The hybrid-format ICANN74 meeting simultaneously eased and exacerbated those feelings. I was so glad to be able to participate in sessions remotely but found myself longing […]