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By: Adam Eisner on June 30th, 2009
Posted in: Announcements
Tags: ICANN Sydney 2009
Comments: 0

Last 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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By: OpenSRS Team on June 30th, 2009
Posted in: Announcements
Tags: Holiday Hours
Comments: 0

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:

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By: OpenSRS Team on June 30th, 2009
Posted in: Partners and Resellers
Tags: Registries
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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.

Available Resources

• .UK News page
• Domain Industry Reports
• Marketing Resources
• How .UK works (PDF)
• Member lunches and Registrar events
• RSS feeds
• Technical Blog
• Insight – management blog
• Discussion lists

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By: Adam Eisner on June 29th, 2009
Posted in: Events
Tags: ICANN Sydney 2009
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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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By: James Koole on June 26th, 2009
Posted in: Inside OpenSRS
Tags: MeetOpenSRS
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In this Meet OpenSRS series we will talk to people from our Technical Support, NOC (Network Operations Center), Ops (Operations), Security and Development teams. We know you count on us to give you high levels of service, so that you can manage your businesses. Our goal is to give you an inside view into how we support and maintain your OpenSRS services.

In these three 5-minute videos, we talk with a few folks from our NOC and Support teams. We refer to our OpenSRS tailored ITIL/ITSM process for ticket handling which uses 4 basic types of tickets (Request, Incident, Change and Problem). In today’s videos we will focus on Request and Incident tickets. Requests are tickets that you submit to our Technical Support team via reseller.supportATopensrsDOTcom or calling us (Toll Free Phone: 1-800-371-6992 or Toll Free Phone (Intl): + 800-371-69922). These tickets are reviewed by Technical Support and can be handled using their expertise or escalated to the NOC for further investigation. If the NOC receives a ticket, it becomes an Incident ticket. They work with Technical Support and other teams to resolve issues. Incident tickets are also created by NOC for items identified by internal troubleshooting or monitoring. (We will talk about Problem and Change tickets later this month when we focus on Operations). All tickets are rated by the type of issue, the service or functionality affected and the number of users affected, so that we can address and report issues in a timely manner.

The first video features Kevin Rueckert, NOC and Support Manager. Kevin talks about his department and how they are working to fulfill the Reseller promise.

Next up is Frank Lemire, Technical Support Team Lead. Frank is very passionate about doing the right thing for Resellers.

Ben Zanin is a Senior NOC analyst. He provides insight into the types of tickets and how NOC responds to escalations and monitored issues.

Let us know if you have any questions about NOC and Technical Support. You can leave a comment or join us in the forum. In the next part of this series, we will talk with AJ Mirani all about Operations.