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We are delighted to be able to tell the world that we are now an ICANN accredited registrar!

I've been attending ICANN events and trying to get to grips with the entire setup for the last couple of years and quickly realised that the only way we could really move forward was to become accredited. We're already accredited with a lot of the ccTLD operators, such as Nominet, AFNIC, Eurid and several others, so getting rid of the middleman for our gTLD domains made sense.

With our own accreditation we'd be able to interact directly with the registry operators and with the wider ICANN and internet community.

I also realised that since the entire RegisterFly debacle  "buying a registrar" was possible, but it would have been a really really bad idea.

So instead of opting for the easy "off the shelf" solution we went through the entire accreditation process from start to finish, so we got it on our own merits, making us the first Irish company to have ever done so.

The accreditation process can be quite confusing, but luckily several good friends and colleagues were able to help clarify various parts of it along the way:

• Jothan Frakes - he's like a walking talking domain encyclopedia (currently working on new gTLDs over here)
  
• Frank Michlick - he's done a lot of this stuff so many times before
• Mark Klein - he's a cool guy and really helpful
• Steve Gobin and Tim Cole - both incredibly helpful and patient 

While we aren't setup to use our accreditation yet with any of the domain registries we will be soon enough (I'm not sure how long that's going to take, but I know that I will have to deal with a LOT of paperwork in the coming weeks!)

We can, however, use the ICANN logo!

As we go through the process of getting the accreditation with the individual domain registry operators (Verisign, Afilias, PIR, dotMobi, Telnic etc.,) I'll try to keep people up to date on our progress.

You can see a full list of the current accredited registrars on the IANA site as well

The shorter a domain name is the better.

When that domain name is being used for mobile content ie. for stuff you're accessing from your mobile phone or other handheld device, the shorter URL will always win out.

I mentioned that dotMobi were planning on releasing one and two character domains some time ago, but it's only in the last couple of days that they have published more information on the process.

Unlike some registries that auction of the really high value domains, dotMobi has been using both auctions and tenders to assign domains. So this time round it will be a tender / proposal based system again.

And the cost?

Well apart from a handling fee of a few hundred euro it won't actually cost you anything.

You can read all about it over on their blog

ICANN has made available a range of statistics and pretty graphs that allow you to see easily what's going on with the various registries it is responsible for. (ccTLDs such as co.uk and .fr are not included for this reason)

Full details of the updated system they've made available may be found on the ICANN site, but if you just want to "jump right in" then you may want to go here.

All of the data regarding registry statistics is made available in other formats, but having it all nicely prepared and graphed helps get to grips with it.

NB: You'll need Flash to view the graphs and there doesn't seem to be any way of re-using the data at present