Handover to Afilias is now complete.
It’s already July 1 in Australia, and that means that Afilias is now the backend registry service provider for over 3 million domain names ending in .Au.
.Au domain overseer auDA put the contract for managing .au out to bid, and in December of last year announced that Afilias won the contract, which had been handled by rival Neustar.
Transitioning a 3.1 million-domain namespace is unprecedented. The previous record for the size of a registry transitioned was .org back in 2003. At the time it had 2.4 million names under management. The gaining registry in that case was also Afilias.
As a result of the .au transition, Afilias now helps run 200 TLDs and more than 22 million domain names.
Unfortunately auDA have kept almost all of the cost savings for themselves.
Bad outcome from Australian consumers, this isn’t what the tender was supposed to be about.