Recent Posts
- ICANN publishes its Woke Manifesto. Here’s my hot take
- Alibaba, Name.com among new RDRS opt-ins
- The Swiss can register .swiss domains from next week
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- ICANN content policing power grab may be dead
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- Some registrars have already quit ICANN’s Whois experiment
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- Internet could get one-letter gTLDs (but there’s a catch)
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- ICANN 79: anonymous trolls and undercover lawyers
- ICANN scores win in single-letter .com lawsuit
- Cosmetics brand terminates its gTLD
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- Governments back down on new gTLD next round delay
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- Registry service provider evaluation handbook published
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- No excuses! PIR to pay for ALL registries to tackle child abuse
- ICANN insists it is working on linkification
- Namecheap sues ICANN over .org price caps
- GoDaddy offers free Ethereum blockchain integration
- Epik reveals who is running the company
- Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…
- Airline gTLD crashes and burns
- First chunks of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook drop
- Epik to reveal its owners soon
- Another crypto firm to apply for a new gTLD
- Monster and Royce are NOT involved in Epik?!
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- Sold for over $20k, insure.ai and dog.ai back in .ai’s expired names auction
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- .ru domains fly off the shelf as Western sanctions bite
- ICANN picks its first ever Supreme Court
- Lebanon’s ccTLD going back to Lebanon after ICANN takeover
- ICANN picks the domain it will never, ever release
- ICANN approves domain takedown rules
- Has Epik gone “woke”?
- First bits of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook expected next week
- ICANN bans closed generics for the foreseeable
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- After 14 years, ICANN practices what it preaches on IDNs
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- Dev releases free open-source TLD registry platform
- INCO flips a gTLD to Identity Digital
- Anguilla fears the .ai junk drop
- Five more gTLDs get launch dates
- $10 million of ICANN cash up for grabs
- Almost 50,000 .ai domains sold in a quarter
- ICANN threatens to regulate your speech [RANT]
- Life insurance company kills dot-brand
- ICANN finds new home for Lebanon’s TLD after founder’s death
- ICANN begs people to use its new Whois service
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- Over 50,000 .ai domains sold in three months
- Amazon planning new push into registrar market?
- Registries and registrars vote ‘Yes’ to new DNS abuse rules
- ICANN predicts flattish 2025 for domain industry
- Fast-growing Gname buys another 150 registrars
- GoDaddy service to let you block domains in over 650 TLDs
- Did I find a murder weapon in a zone file?
- ICANN drops the “man” from Ombudsman
- Have your say on police domain takedown powers
- Most registrars are shunning ICANN’s new Whois system
- Nominet to take over .gov.uk
- ICANN picks Istanbul for 2024 meeting
- ICANN’s private Whois data request service goes live
- .au regs slide on 2LD anniversary
- ICANN accused of power grab over $271 million auction fund
- A registrar is getting blamed for an Israeli war propaganda site
- Two more dot-brands bite the dust
- Google sells five-figure AI domain and six-figure .ing hack
- .blackfriday is still a bit rubbish
- Internet Naming Co acquires five more gTLDs
Afilias sues India to block $12 million Neustar back-end deal
Afilias has sued the Indian government to prevent it awarding the .in ccTLD back-end registry contract to fierce rival Neustar.
The news emerged in local reports over the weekend and appears to be corroborated by published court documents.
According to Moneycontrol, the National Internet Exchange of India plans to award the technical service provider contract to Neustar, after over a decade under Afilias, but Afilias wants the deal blocked.
The contract would also include some 15 current internationalized domain name ccTLDs, with another seven on the way, in addition to .in.
That’s something Afilias reckons Neustar is not technically capable of, according to reports.
Afilias’ lawsuit reportedly alleges that Neustar “has no experience or technical capability to manage and support IDNs in Indian languages and scripts and neither does it claim to have prior experience in Indian languages”.
Neustar runs plenty of IDN TLDs for its dot-brand customers, but none of them appear to be in Indian scripts.
NIXI’s February request for proposals (pdf) contains the requirement: “Support of IDN TLDs in all twenty two scheduled Indian languages and Indian scripts”.
I suppose it’s debatable what this means. Actual, hands-on, operational experience running Indian-script TLDs at scale would be a hell of a requirement to put in an RFP, essentially locking Afilias into the contract for years to come.
Only Verisign and Public Interest Registry currently run delegated gTLDs that use officially recognized Indian scripts, according to my database. And those TLDs — such as Verisign’s .कॉम (the Devanagari .com) — are basically unused.
Neither Neustar nor Afilias have responded to DI’s requests for comment today.
.in has over 2.2 million domains under management, according to NIXI.
Neustar’s Indian subsidiary undercut its rival with a $0.70 per-domain-year offer, $0.40 cheaper than Afilias’ $1.10, according to Moneycontrol.
That would make the deal worth north of $12 million over five years for Afilias and over $7.7 million for Neustar.
One can’t help but be reminded of the two companies’ battle over Australia’s .au, which Afilias sneaked out from under long-time incumbent Neustar late last year.
That handover, the largest in DNS history, was completed relatively smoothly a couple months ago.
Fact is that as long as a registry know how to process label generation rules in general, knowing specific scripts isn’t really a know-how.
Perhaps having support in different languages to serve registrars with different native languages would be interesting, but that’s pretty much what is needed.
And guess what ? India has so many support center outsource operations, that one can hire natives of those languages to perform support and interact with your back-office in English.
People seem to like market forces, except when those forces turn on them.