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Afilias sues India to block $12 million Neustar back-end deal

Kevin Murphy, August 27, 2018, 19:13:18 (UTC), Domain Registries

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.



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Comments (1)

  1. Rubens Kuhl says:

    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.

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