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GoDaddy among five companies competing for .za contract

Kevin Murphy, February 21, 2022, 13:03:16 (UTC), Domain Registries

Five companies are bidding for the contract to run the back-end for South Africa’s .za domains, which is expected to be awarded shortly.

Local ccTLD overseer ZADNA has named ZA Registry Consortium (ZARC), Lexreg and Fevertree Consulting Consortium, GoDaddy Registry, The Bean App & GMO Internet Group, and Catalytic Peter capital Consortium as respondents to its 2021 RFP.

Of those, only GoDaddy is a lone bidder, and the only one without an obvious South African partner. The rest are consortia, apparently newly created to bid for the contract.

ZARC is a venture of incumbent back-end ZA Central Registry and its affiliated commercial arm Domain Name Services, according to ZACR.

Lexreg and Fevertree Consulting Consortium appears to be made up of local corporate registrar Lexsynergy and a South African consulting firm.

The Bean App is a South African startup registrar. Its partner GMO is the Japanese registry provider behind .shop and a bunch of geographic and dot-brand gTLDs.

I’m sorry to say I have no idea what “Catalytic Peter” is. It has no internet footprint and ZADNA has not revealed any information beyond the name.

ZADNA said it is “currently at the advanced stage of the final checkpoints of the procurement process.”

.za has over 1.3 million domains and over 600 registrars. While ZACR currently runs four additional African geographic gTLDs, .za is by far its biggest deal in terms of registrations.


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