auDA has released a Request for Tender (RFT) for a backend registry operator for the .au ccTLD and the 4.2 million domain names under management.
The current registry tender was won by Afilias in 2018. Then Afilias was acquired by the mostly new gTLD registry Donuts in 2020, who rebranded themselves as Identity Digital in 2022. Prior to this, since auDA’s inception in 2002, the backend registry for the .au ccTLD registry operation was operated by AusRegistry, an Australian company founded by Adrian Kinderis in 2000. In 2015 AusRegistry was acquired by Neustar, and then in 2020 Neustar’s registry business was sold to GoDaddy, which renamed their registry services under the GoDaddy Registry subsidiary.
There are currently over 4.2 million .au domain names under management with 3.1 million of these under com.au, 748,000 directly under .au and 217,000 under net.au. There are several other second level domains (org.au, id.au, asn.au, edu.au and gov.au) that are managed by auDA and included in the registry tender, but none of these have more than 100,000 registrations.
Currently .au is the tenth largest top-level domain (TLD) behind .com, .cn, .de, .net, .uk, .org, .nl and .br as well as being the seventh largest country code top-level domain (ccTLD) according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.
Identity Digital’s contract is scheduled to expire on 30 June 2024 with the RFT seeking to appoint a .au registry operator to commence on 1 July 2024 for an initial term of four years.
The RFT seeks tenders “detailing registry services to support more than four million .au domain names and to deliver technical expertise to auDA, as a provider of Australian critical infrastructure.” While that doesn’t appear to rule out registry operators that haven’t managed 4 million domain names before, it appears that experience would be very useful and so means the field is quite small for potential tenders.
“auDA is pleased to support an open, fair and competitive tender process to select a .au registry operator,” said auDA CEO Rosemary Sinclair. “We look forward to receiving tenders from organisations that share a commitment to delivering value to Australians through .au.”
More details on the 2023 Registry Services Tender are available here.