Blog Articles
Reaffirming our commitment to combatting DNS abuse
Abuse is a significant problem on the Internet today and, as a provider of Internet infrastructure services, we constantly consider what role we should play in combatting this issue. We actively investigate and respond to reports of abuse, but like other registrars and registries, we’ve been alone in developing our approach—until now. Abuse has been […]
The evolution of the domain transfer process
ICANN’s Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy (IRTP) defines the procedures and rules for domain name transfers. When it was first introduced in 2004, the Policy was limited to inter-registrar transfers. Over the years, it has been revised by Policy Development Process (PDP) Working Groups and expanded to include governance of domain ownership transfers and a transfer dispute […]
Updates from ICANN64 – Kobe, Japan
A small delegation from Tucows attended ICANN64 in Kobe, Japan, and we want to share a few quick highlights about the progress made in some key areas. RDAP working group RDAP, everyone’s favourite new registration data access protocol, is now in the implementation phase. This means that registrars and registries must implement RDAP according to […]
ICANN updates: EPDP phase 1 final report
ICANN’s Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP) team has issued their Phase 1 Final Report, marking the end of this stage of the project. The recommendations from this Report will become mandatory as of February 29, 2020, but contracted parties (registrars and registries) are permitted to implement them sooner. We’re still determining what specific changes we’ll […]
What does data privacy mean to you?
For Data Privacy Day 2019, we wanted to do something a little bit different. Regular readers will know that we write about things like the GDPR and email security fairly often, as part of our efforts to keep our reseller partners up to date about the state of data privacy and security in the domain […]
ICANN updates: new transfer policy, RDAP, and privacy and proxy service accreditation
This is the third post in our series on the ICANN 63 conference that was held in Barcelona in October 2018. You can also take a look back at our recap of the EPDP team’s work leading up to and during the conference, and our discussion of the Unified Access Model, which will eventually […]
ICANN 63 recap: “Unified Access” to registration data
This is the second post in our series on the ICANN 63 conference that was held in Barcelona in October 2018. Before diving in, we recommend taking a look at our recap of the EPDP team’s work leading up to and during the conference. You can watch this space for the final post in the […]
ICANN 63 recap: EPDP and temp spec updates
TL;DR: Much of the ICANN 63 conference focused on the GDPR’s effects on our industry. We’ve recapped the EPDP team’s work, focusing on the possible policy outcomes that could most significantly affect our resellers and registrants: should admin and tech contacts continue to be collected and published? Should domain providers be required to differentiate between […]
Important changes to our legal agreements
We appreciate the work that our reseller partners have done, alongside our own, to come into compliance with the GDPR. In support of that work, please review our updated Master Services Agreement and domain registration agreement. These updated contracts will go into effect 25 May, 2018. These changes primarily relate to the registrant’s consent management […]
GDPR updates: domain transfer process changes
TL;DR The registrar transfer process for gTLDs needs to change once the public Whois “goes dark”. The end result will be a process that creates a more streamlined experience for domain owners, while continuing to be secure against domain theft. Moving forward, resellers should use the “sw_register” API call for inbound transfers and include the transfer […]
