Tag: ICANN

Announcements, Voice of LogicBoxes

The Voice of LogicBoxes – Vol. 2

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Hello folks!

Here’s the second volume of the Voice of LogicBoxes – our bi-annual newsletter on OrderBox updates and other changes that affect your Registrar business. This volume covers the latter half of 2011.

SYSTEM UPDATES

  • We’ve added 2 new domain extensions to the system – .XXX, .AU

  • The look and feel of the Registrar, Reseller and Customer control panels are in the process of being completely re-designed. As a precursor to this, we’ve already made changes to the CSS to give the header, menu and the widgets a modern and cleaner look

  • As part of our ongoing exercise to revamp OrderBox, we’ve clubbed all branding-related tasks for Registrars under one roof with the introduction of “Branding Settings”. Older, text-heavy pages have been given a cleaner, crisper and lighter look

  • We’ve also initiated a refactoring exercise for our Bulk Tools where we started with the most heavily-used Bulk Renewals and Registrations. Under this, we refactored the backend code as well as enhanced front-end flows of the Bulk Renewal process. Based on feedback received from Partners, we are currently working on further enhancements to the Bulk Renewal process where we will be attempting to make the flows more intuitive for Customers too

  • As part of our initiative to build out our Hosting product portfolio, we’ve launched Multi-Domain Hosting (MDH) on our Linux platform. With this product, you can now host multiple domains under one cPanel account.

  • For managing feedback, we’ve restarted UserVoice. Our Product Managers are actively interacting with the Registrar Community to prioritise on features and upgrades that need to be added to the system

OTHER ACTIVITIES

  • We conducted two webinars in association with Verisign folks:
    1. A detailed walkthrough of the “Verisign Customer Center”
    2. “Verisign New Unit Marketing Promo” that gave Registrars detailed information on upcoming promotions in 2012

  • We also conducted a webinar in conjunction with ICM Registry – the .XXX registry to spread awareness about the new .XXX domain name

  • We also attended hugely popular conferences like HostingCon, Parallels APAC and the ICANN meet at Senegal. We’ll most probably be attending these events again, so if you want to meet us at these events in 2012, let us know

If you have any feedback or would like to hear more about the content of this edition, do let us know!

Pic Courtesy SparkeyDavis

Announcements, Industry News, Registries

.XXX now LIVE on OrderBox

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The .XXX domain extension is now fully LIVE on OrderBox. After a minor delay, the Registry went live with General Availability of .XXX a few hours ago. Domains will now be available on a First-Come, First-Serve basis.

Registrars: Please contact your respective Account Managers if you have any queries about .XXX domains. We’ve got ready-made collaterals for you to use in your marketing activities.

In their latest Press Release, Stuart Lawley, CEO of ICM Registry commented:

“While adult entertainment is enjoyable to many adults, it is not appropriate for all audiences. We created .XXX to address the unique needs of the online adult entertainment industry. The public response has been overwhelming as consumers and the adult entertainment providers are excited about the benefits and infinite possibilities of .XXX.”

Announcements, Current Promos, Press Releases

LogicBoxes Crosses 6 Million Domains

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We’ve now crossed the 6 Million mark for Domains registered through our platform – OrderBox.

It took us a little under a year to grow from 4 Million to 5 Million Domains, a milestone we crossed at the start of this year. Comparatively, the latest Million was achieved in just over 9 months!

We owe this achievement to our extensive channel partner network that includes 90+ ICANN Accredited Domain Name Registrars and over 60,000+ Resellers. Every partner has access to a basket of 50+ Domain Name extensions and Web Service products like Web Hosting, Email Hosting, Website Builders and Digital Certificates. This has allowed each partner to quickly setup successful online businesses and play a first-hand role in increasing the online penetration of their local region.

“We’ve been consistently introducing newer TLDs and products into the system to ensure that our Registrars have all the tools they need to capture their target markets,” said Sandeep Ramchandani, Director, LogicBoxes. “We’ve also been working closely with various Domain Registries to garner the best domain rates for our Registrars and plan on further boosting these activities in the coming months.”

Over 20% of the world’s ICANN Accredited Registrars have been accredited through our consultancy service. LogicBoxes’ product portfolio includes a comprehensive provisioning & management platform for various web products and services such as Domain Registration, Windows/Linux Web Hosting, Email Hosting, SSL, Website Builder etc. LogicBoxes recently launched their FREE DNS Service and other products such as Domain and Mail Forwarding and Chat (IM) are expected to go free shortly.

ICANN Announcements

ICANN Strengthens Registrar Accreditation Applications

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As per their latest announcement, ICANN has recently introduced an enhanced set of terms and conditions for Registrar Accreditation Applications.

The company says that this step is a result of community input that called for the strengthening of the requirements for registrar accreditation, and to address changes that have arisen in the registrar marketplace.

While they haven’t mentioned the specific enhancements, they’ve publicized a partial list of changes. This incudes:

  • Stronger terms governing the accuracy of the information provided by the applicant and an ongoing obligation to maintain accurate information during the course of the application process
  • Granting ICANN permission and indemnification for conducting additional due diligence checks
  • Sets forth in greater detail the application process and obligations

These terms and conditions will be applicable on all applications received on or after October 5, 2011.

UPDATE: 10th October, 2011

We’ve done an analysis of the exact changes and have enlisted them here for everyone’s reference:

1. Individual & Sole proprietorships are ineligible for accreditation

2. The applicant can withdraw a submitted application and the one-time application fee will remain valid for one year. However, if before the application is resubmitted, the one-time application fee is increased, the applicant will have to pay the difference.

3. ICANN reserves the right
a. to use the name and logo of the applicant wrt the application
b. Share the info rmation in the application with relevant third parties for the purpose of due-diligence
c. Disclose / share / publish any info rmation from the application including any personal, technical and financial info rmation

4. ICANN indemnifies itself from any damages / loss caused to the applicant, by way of the review process or if the application is rejected

5. If the applicant wishes to keep any part of the application confidential, he can do so according to a set of guidelines laid out by ICANN

6. ICANN explicitly mentions that it must comply with all U.S. laws, rules, and regulations and the fact that it cannot work with any country/company/individual on which US has imposed sanctions

7. ICANN also mentions that any additional information / documents that it requests, must be provided within 72 hours

Key take-aways:
Make sure your application is complete, accurate, consistent and thorough right from the start. This is even more important than before, and can hardly be stressed upon enough. Ensuring so, will avoid unnecessary delays and iterations. Since there will be third part investigating agencies involved, we expect the delays due to iterations to be longer than usual.

Found this post useful? Need help with ICANN Accreditation? You know who to contact 😉

Announcements, Industry News

CENTR’s Latest Domain Wire Report

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The Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries (CENTR) recently released their latest DomainWire Stat Report for 2011. This can be found on the CENTR Website.

Quick stats from the detailed report:

  • The largest ccTLD is still .DE followed by .UK, .NL. RU, .EU and .CN in order
  • The 20 largest ccTLD Registries manage together around 63 million domain names representing 75% of all ccTLD domain names globally

Global TLD Breakdown:


It’s going to be interesting to see whether the new gTLDs might affect the growth of these ccTLDs in any way. What do you think?