Last December, we told you that we were embarking on ICANN accreditation, which would allow us to become a direct registrar for the most popular domains. And now it’s here 🙂
On Tuesday 17. On March 2020, the colleague who coordinated the accreditation process received an official report from ICANN headquarters:
Congratulations on your ICANN Registrar Accreditation! This is to notify you that you have successfully completed the ICANN registrar accreditation process.
So as of this week, WEDOS Internet, Inc. is an ICANN accredited registrar.
But let’s start gradually 🙂
Who is ICANN
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN for short, is a non-profit organization founded in 1998 to manage the DNS system that makes the Internet as we know it work. Without DNS, we would not be able to use Internet domains.
Their most important tasks today include running root name servers, overseeing domain registries, and distributing IP addresses.
But ICANN’s role is far more fundamental. It is they who formulate the rules and regulations for the future shape of the Internet and oversee their implementation.
What is ICANN accreditation
To become ICANN accredited, you must go through several steps. For example, you need to prove to ICANN that your company is financially stable enough to take care of your customers in the event of a crisis.
You need to show that you have the right internal processes in place and can take care of both the customer and their service. Which has not been a problem for us, because we have been doing everything honestly from the beginning and our ISO certifications (9001, 14001, 27001) prove it.
There was also a screening by ICANN, where they had us vetted. They went through the negative reviews and reactions on the internet and sent us a few for comment. We have gone through all of them thoroughly and, in fact, we were pleased to see that most of the customers who were so vocal in their reviews and reactions eventually solved their problem and even stayed with us.
In only one case did it look like we were really the bad guys who limited the customer’s service. This was a case going back many years where someone was regularly abusing the customer’s service and we dealt with them repeatedly. But then it came to the point that communications apparently linked to terrorist activity went through the service, and all pro-customer attitudes had to be put aside there.
References for the approval process were provided not only by our customers but also by EUrid, which confirmed that we are one of the 30 largest .EU domain registrars in the world and, most importantly, that there are no complications and problems with us.
So ICANN accreditation is actually a mark of quality. The organisation that oversees the Internet will check you out and verify that you can provide a sufficient level of service to become an accredited registrar. They check everything thoroughly and do their own screening of customer reviews and ratings all over the internet.
Why we need ICANN accreditation
ICANN has decided that only companies that obtain accreditation can register certain domains. The others, just as we have had to do so far, depend on an intermediary who has this accreditation.
With ICANN accreditation, we can now send an application to become a registrar to the individual domain registries that take care of tier 1 domains. Once we meet their terms and conditions, pay the fees and connect our system to theirs, we can offer full registrar services to you, our customer.
What it will mean for you
Above all, ICANN accreditation means that your domains are safe and well taken care of with us. We have adequate technical, security, financial and personnel background. We had to prove all that. You demonstrate not only property and financial circumstances, but also sufficient background. You also demonstrate expertise and practical experience. You must also show technical knowledge and prepare various technical matters. Lawyers will also find their own 🙂 . It’s a process of several months.
By the way, we are only the second Czech company with ICANN accreditation. That’s saying something too 😉
As soon as we start working with selected domain registries, you can look forward to an expanded range of domains. We want to add the most popular nTLDs (domains that were created under ICANN’s new daemon ending program) such as .online, .website, .blog, .tech and many more.
We have been negotiating with domain registries for a couple of months now and we are already arranging joint promotions for our customers. Definitely something to look forward to 🙂
As far as the supranational domains that we now have on offer (.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info and .name) are concerned, there are still negotiations to be done. Once we meet the requirements of the registry and become the registrar, we will gradually move everything to us.
After your domain is managed by WEDOS Internet, a.s., you can look forward to better prices in the long run, but we will also have more options to solve any problems, because our system will be directly connected to the registry.
For other domains from our offer (.cz, .sk, .eu, .pl) nothing changes. We are already an accredited registrar here.
So you will soon see new domain extensions in our offer.
But it doesn’t stop there
As you know, we offer all our customers WAPI (WEDOS API) for free to work with domains. Many companies take advantage of this by registering domains on behalf of their customers through us. With the expansion of our offer we will also expand WAPI.
We are preparing a number of extensions to the domains. Most of them will be connected to new services we are developing (for example wedos.online). Some of it will even be completely offline. Let us surprise you, we’ll be introducing it soon 🙂 But we already revealed that we want to offer Anycast DNS servers, Anycast DDoS protection, Anycast Proxy servers and Anycast CDN servers and more and more soon… 🙂 We’re working on getting this offered as soon as possible.