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ARI wins three Aussie geo-gTLD contracts

Kevin Murphy, February 22, 2012, 12:10:03 (UTC), Domain Registries

In what may be the most dog-bites-man piece of news I’ve carried in a while, ARI Registry Services has won the contracts to run Australian geographic gTLDs .melbourne, .sydney and .victoria.
The deals were awarded by the governments of New South Wales and Victoria, following a Request For Proposals initiated in October.
ARI said today that that Melbourne IT and Ernst & Young are also going to be involved in preparing the ICANN hew gTLD application.
ARI is a subsidiary of AusRegistry Group, which already runs the back-end for .au, which made it favorite for Australian geo-gTLDs from the outset.
Cloud Registry, CoCCA and Sedari, which also have connections to the region, were also known to be jointly bidding for the contracts.
I’m quite bullish on city gTLDs, particularly the large tourist-hungry cities such as London and New York..
Not only are most city gTLD going to be uncontested slam-dunk applications, I think in many cases they’re also going to see great demand from local small businesses.

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Comments (2)

  1. Ray Marshall says:

    I agree with your assessment on City gTLDs. Social will become more local for residents, businesses, and governments via City gTLDs. Unlike other applicants for new gTLDs, cities will have the financial wherewithal and pre-existing infrastructure to market their domains. Of course, cities will have to deal with certain challenges as well. E-mail sent via City gTLD e-mail addresses may get flagged as spam. Websites built on City gTLDs may also be flagged as being suspicious. Given these challenges, I think City gTLDs will prevail as a value-added solution for those looking to become more local on the Internet.
    On a personal note, I’ve been supporting this concept via the .LA domain space since 2003. Nine years later, we’re now seeing cities applying for their own City gTLD. I believe the .LA domain space will certainly benefit from this movement as awareness and use of City gTLDs grows on the Internet.

  2. Congratulations to ARI Team. However with the involvement of E&Y in the application and with E&Y also being one of the evaluators , conflicts of interest could arise . Best to use another firm of accountants ! Another problem to address when the batching process is finally revealed

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