During remarks made at the 54th ICANN Meeting being held in Dublin, Akram Atallah, the President of the Global Domain Domains Division of ICANN stated that there are now 2,121 ICANN Accredited Domain Name Registrars in the world.
ICANN has accredited 579 domain name registrars just since the last ICANN meeting in Buenos Aires 53, which was held June 21-25, 2015.
ICANN has also dropped the requirement that a domain registrar carry liability insurance which should great increase domain registrars outside of the United States and Europe saying:
“We’ve announced that,and the board approved, waving the insurance requirement for registrar accreditation. I think that’s very helpful for mostly in countries outside of the U.S. and Europe where this insurance is very hard to get and it’s cumbersome. so i think it’s going to help a lot of our registrars. We found that it didn’t achieve what ICANN wanted.
The insurance wasn’t about protecting the registrant. It was more about, you know, accidental insurance in the work, in the workplace. So that wasn’t really what was what it was intended to be and i hope that the community of registrars would get together and figure out that there is another requirement that you should put in place of that to protect the registrants.”
Other stats released by Mr. Atallah dealt with the new gTLD program:
Back at ICANN 53 we said we were going to increase the number of delegated gTLD to 775 by this meeting and we didn’t get there. We’re at 769. So we’re about six short right now, and I’m hoping for the end of the week, we will hit that mark.”
“We’ve signed 1200 registry agreements.
We believe right now we’re probably 64 registry agreements away from the total number we expect to see.
Of course if there are withdrawals, that will be, that will be fewer agreements. but we’re almost there on the agreement side. and the delegation side, we still have a few to go, but we think they will go in waves.
So the program is at the tail end of the execution path.
The remaining ones will be some that have some issues, and, therefore, they might take some longer time, but as a whole, the program has been exercised for all the processes that we — that applications have to go through have been exercised, and we believe that this is winding down.””
