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Nine registries fighting for .au contract
Kevin Murphy,
October 4, 2017, 11:06:35 (UTC),
Domain Registries
Nine domain name companies are battling it out for the right to run Australia’s .au ccTLD.
That’s according to auDA, the .au registry, providing an update on the latest stage of its “registry transformation” project today.
A decision on which company to select could be made as soon as a month from now, though the process does seem to be running a week behind schedule due to contenders asking for more time to write their tenders.
One company that will certainly have applied for the job is incumbent Neustar, which has been running .au for the last 15 years (through its relatively AusRegistry acquisition).
Having earlier indicated that it was looking for somebody to build an in-house registry, auDA later clarified (or U-turned) that it wanted to stick with an outsourced back-end provider.
The apparent decision to bring the service in-house came in for some criticism from some auDA members, which waned when it emerged outsourcing was the only solution on the table.
There are about 3.1 million .au domains today, and the back-end gets roughly $5 a year (USD) per name.
Seems registries can really get a deal these days on backend contracts.