GoDaddy could lose out as NIXI brings .in in-house
Indian ccTLD registry NIXI wants to become a back-end registry services provider for its own .in and other TLDs, and seems set to push GoDaddy out of its current role as it looks for a company to build its new infrastructure.
The company is looking to expand its current role as .in overseer and take over day-to-day operational management of the EPP registry, DNS, Whois, etc, from its current back-end. That’s been Neustar, now GoDaddy Registry, since 2019.
By the time the transition takes place, it could be the largest TLD migration in history.
NIXI currently says it has over three million domains under management. The previous biggest move was .au from Neustar to Afilias in 2018, at 3.1 million names. The .org migration from Verisign to PIR in 2003 was for 2.7 million names.
NIXI basically wants a company to come in to design and build a registry system, run it for a year, and then hand over operations, and maybe staff, to NIXI before retreating into a maintenance role for seven years.
The selected provider must be established in India and preference will be given to “companies whose parent / holding company is registered in India having subsidiaries in other developing countries.”
If NIXI already has a preferred provider in mind, it certainly isn’t GoDaddy, judging by this criterion.
“This is as part of future expansion plan / business plan of NIXI,” the tender (pdf), which says several times that NIXI wants to become the back-end for ccTLDs in other developing countries, notes.
After a number of extensions, NIXI’s tender is due to expire next Monday.
So who won the TSP backend infra project development for IN Registry?