Identity Digital will run .au for another four years.
Identity Digital has won a tender allowing it to continue serving as the registry operating for Australia’s .au domain names.
Afilias won the previous tender in 2017, stealing the business from Neustar. Identity Digital acquired Afilias in late 2020, taking over the technical registry operations of .au domains.
auDA, the organization that manages .au, put the contract out to tender in May this year. Today (oddly, a Sunday in Australia), auDA issued a press release saying that Identity Digital won the tender for the new contract that begins in July 2024. The contract runs for four years.
About 4.2 million .au domains were registered at the end of last quarter.
Financial terms of the deal were not revealed in the release. Last year, auDA paid AU $1,332,592 in “Domain Name System infrastructure expense.” It’s not clear if some costs of the registry contract are included in other line items. But even if so, it doesn’t seem that auDA is paying more than a dollar or two per year per domain in registry fees per year to Identity Digital.
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