Afilias made the jaw dropping announcement to registrars this week that the .au wholesale, or registry fee, is being reduced by a whopping A$0.05 or 0.63%.
With 3,561,394 .au domain names registered today, this means a saving to registrants of around $178,000, assuming registrars pass on the reduction. But as one industry veteran told me “It’s actually more expensive for registrars to change their price tables and deal with requests, particularly from domain investors (domainers) asking for the reduction to be passed on.” So expect some, or most, registrars to pocket the savings.
In an email to registrars Afilias wrote it “is pleased to inform you of the following updates to wholesale pricing for new registration, renewal, change Of Registrant and .au Direct application fee transactions of .au second and sub-zone levels effective 1 June 2022.”
The reduction will take the existing wholesale price for .au domain names from $7.88 (+GST) to $7.83 effective 1 June.
Of course, after my article last week on the launch of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s .auCheck that showed auDA’s website needed some work on security issues, and Afilias’ failed miserably, maybe the policy and regulatory body and backend registry should have kept the money and spent it on improving their websites.
The announcement of the price reduction comes in the same week auDA released their Q1 2022 Quarterly Report [pdf]. In some positive news auDA reported on the launch of “.au direct”, registrations at the second level. In the first 24 hours of its launch on 24 March 35,000 .au domain names were registered and almost 80,000 by 31 March.
Of those registrations, around 9% were registered by not-for-profit organisations, 13% by individuals and 78% by businesses. As one who championed for registrations at the second level for over a decade because of the poor options for individual registrants, I was somewhat pleased with the number of registrations by individuals.
In other highlights from the report, the auDA Foundation awarded 15 grants for education and research initiatives. auDA also completed their second annual ISO 27001 surveillance audit, meeting their information security requirements while almost all registrars are now ISO 27001 certified or have a progress plan in place.