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ICANN Waives Registrar Insurance Requirement, Levels Playing Field for Registrars Globally

A resolution recently approved by the ICANN Board of Directors will promote enhanced gTLD registrar competition in the global domain name marketplace by removing an unnecessary barrier to registrar accreditation. Since 1999, the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) has required that registrars maintain Commercial General Liability (CGL) insurance policies with policy limits of at least US$ 500,000. Following 18 months of research, analysis and community consultation, the Board determined that this type of insurance may not serve its intended purpose of protecting registrants, and, in fact, may have inhibited the ability of prospective registrars to become accredited in some regions. Accordingly, on 28 September 2015 ICANN's board resolved that ICANN waive this requirement in all RAAs, effective immediately.

CGL insurance policies generally only cover certain incidents that occur on a company's premises. Examples of qualifying events may include a customer that is injured in an accident on the premises or an incident that occurs due to an employee's actions. While this coverage is useful for these types of incidents, it would not cover registrars' potentially wrongful acts, such as failure to renew a domain name.

Another factor that was considered was the availability and cost of CGL insurance globally. While it is common and readily available in some regions, it is more difficult to find—if available at all—and significantly more expensive in many other regions, including parts of South America and Africa.

For example, a community member from Nigeria reported in a recent forum of public comments that under Nigerian law businesses headquartered in that country are required to purchase insurance coverage from Nigerian companies at a substantial premium. Using the US dollar-to-Naira exchange rate at that time, the ICANN-required policy limit was roughly 156.7 times the 2014 Nigerian GDP per capita or the total income of the country divided by the number of inhabitants, giving a rough estimate of the average individual income. By contrast, the CGL policy limit was approximately 9.2 times the USD GDP per capita in the United States (GDP data from the World Bank).

At the Board's direction, staff will begin notifying registrars of the waiver. The Board also requested that the GNSO Council consider whether to undertake policy work on a substitute RAA insurance requirement.

For more information about the impact of this decision on prospective and existing registrars and the broader internet community, see ICANN's RAA Insurance Waiver FAQs.

Comments

    khandoker golam morsheed  02:00 UTC on 31 August 2016

    How can submit non profit organization for wever ?

    khandoker golam morsheed  02:02 UTC on 31 August 2016

    Where is compain abuse unless work domain keeping ?

    ufuk çağlayan  15:49 UTC on 02 December 2016

    I make mistakes. You open sultanimtatli.com please

    secura  06:52 UTC on 27 December 2016

    It is a good approach by ICANN to waive registrar insurance requirements, especially helpful for registrars in developping countries. By the way: No registrar is obliged to cancel now the liability insurance. I see one problem: The causes mentioned by ICANN seem not to be known by the registries. Some registries have still registrar insurance requirements. Hans-Peter Oswald

    vahid tilavi  11:54 UTC on 02 June 2017

    thakyou all for help and trust

    Kaleed  05:00 UTC on 07 August 2017

    MailSing

    Saeed Alavi  02:47 UTC on 14 September 2017

    Saeed Alavi

    Purvis Grice  15:47 UTC on 06 January 2018

    Your registration is hard to follow, I sign up one day give all the information that was required and ask for on your from.

    comfapas comfapas  07:09 UTC on 15 January 2018

    Perfect

    amirmohammadabbasi  12:19 UTC on 16 January 2018

    Your registration is hard to follow, I sign up one day give all the information that was required and ask for on your from.

    Haitham Dakheel  13:57 UTC on 19 February 2018

    From time to time my question is about registering with dyn. how I register??

    TIAGO DOS ANJOS LIMA  03:50 UTC on 23 April 2018

    O meu endereço de dominó Vcs estão falando que está errado e quero que vcs entre em contato com migo tá bom

    Keerthi prasad  20:10 UTC on 07 May 2018

    Thank you. But a clarity in registration process will be great.

    Richard Jordan  07:52 UTC on 30 June 2018

    I'm just gonna make it quick ur awesome thanks

    adminstratos  10:41 UTC on 11 August 2018

    icahosting

    Kritsadakorn Kaewkham  13:14 UTC on 28 October 2018

    'AS IS'

    Kritsadakorn Kaewkham  13:16 UTC on 28 October 2018

    EIP-20 Master

    Kritsadakorn Kaewkham  13:25 UTC on 28 October 2018

    GACC on March 21. 2016

    Kritsadakorn Kaewkham  13:30 UTC on 28 October 2018

    APFS_4K_OBJS

    Kathy Wood  16:18 UTC on 29 November 2018

    Do I Need to Register

    Gina Toussaint  12:20 UTC on 19 January 2019

    This is my first time registering, did I register

    Asad satti  13:12 UTC on 31 January 2019

    This is my first time registering, did I registera

    Rey Botle  10:54 UTC on 28 February 2019

    I need to register . Help me sign up one day . I Need all the information that was required .

    Mantas Kanisauskas  11:49 UTC on 28 February 2019

    hello first time i sign up

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Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."