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CIRA becomes first new gTLD back-end since 2012

Kevin Murphy, September 22, 2016, 18:00:44 (UTC), Domain Registries

CIRA, the Canadian ccTLD manager, has become the first new registry back-end provider to enter the gTLD market since the 2012 application round closed.
The company today announced that it has signed Dot Kiwi, operator of .kiwi, as its first client.
.kiwi will become the first non-.ca TLD that CIRA runs the back-end for, according to VP of product development Dave Chiswell.
CIRA has already completed pre-delegation testing and technical evaluation with ICANN, he told DI today.
It is believed to be the first back-end provider not attached to any 2012-round application to go through the PDT process.
That would make CIRA essentially the first company to officially enter the gTLD back-end market since 2012, in other words.
The .kiwi contract was up for grabs due to the fact that Minds + Machines, its original supplier, decided to get out of the back-end business earlier this year.
All of M+M’s own stable of gTLDs are being moved to Nominet right now, but customers such as Dot Kiwi were not obliged to follow.
Chiswell said that CIRA’s system, which is called Fury, has some patent-pending “tagging” technology that cannot be found at rival providers.
He said that registry operator clients get a GUI through which they can manage pricing tiers and promotions based on criteria such as substrings and registration dates without having to fill out a ticket and get CIRA staff involved, which he said is a unique selling point.
CIRA’s goals now are to try to sign up more TLDs (cc’s or g’s) to Fury, and to attempt to get Canadian brands and cities to apply for gTLDs in the next round, whenever that may be.
The company also intends to migrate .ca over to Fury from its legacy infrastructure at some point, he said.

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Comments (5)

  1. Mike says:

    Wow, this is interesting. Hopefully no Canadian cities waste money on their own TLD’s though. There are plenty of opportunities within .ca, I don’t see any demand existing for Canadian city TLD’s

  2. YamadaMedia says:

    10,000 .KIWI domains compared to New Zealand’s ccTLD, .NZ, with 668,000 registrations.
    https://dnc.org.nz/node/1009
    https://dnc.org.nz/node/997
    .KIWI estimated they would have 20% share of .NZ registrations.

  3. Steve says:

    I wonder if .kiwi will keep the default whois private for individuals the way Cira does for Canadians. Previously incompetent arbi”traitors” for current gtld’s have ruled privacy whois is grounds for bad faith registration.

Leave a Reply to Mike