Christians rail against GoDaddy’s six-color gay rights flag

GoDaddy changed its social media avatars to a gay rights flag yesterday, incurring the wrath of some self-declared Christians and US right-wingers.

The change was made in recognition of LGBT Pride Month, in which every June gay rights groups hold marches and generally celebrate/call for equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
The most egregious thing about the change is surely that there’s a color missing. For some reason, the world’s largest registrar has decided that rainbows look better with only six colors.
But many customers took to Facebook to decry the change on religious or political grounds.
Here’s a sample of some of the comments on the logo.

Now finding another service !!! I don’t support this crap !! I serve s higher power and I am as a Christian warrior to turn my back on this !!!

Don’t you start making a hard left turn to GoDaddy, are you gonna choose the coastal liberals over the other half of the country? Stay out of politics and picking sides. Your not above Boycott like every other Mega Company that chooses a Globalist agenda…

Keep your sexual or political opinion out of your business or I’ll leave your business son! Weather I agree or disagree Im not doing business with you for you to push your views upon me! Just sell me websites and hosting and keep your mouth shut, thanks!

Not doing business there anymore

To be fair, compared to the size of GoDaddy’s customer base, the number of outraged commenters was vanishingly small. I don’t think anyone at GoDaddy is shaking in their boots over the possible loss of a few hard-core right-wing customers.
But those saying it’s a political statement may have a point.
It might be interesting to note that on GoDaddy’s Facebook page for the UK, where equal rights are far less controversial and barely considered a mainstream political issue, the company has not changed its logo.
There were also lots of comments in favor of the change, of course.

Always been a huge fan of godaddy. Your customer service and products are superior. Now I’m even more of a fan. Thanks for taking a powerful stand, even amidst these trolls. I can’t even believe the hate spewing from them. #teamGoDaddy

Comment section, its not getting political or “imposing views” on others to support & respect gays as human beings. They’re not talking about gun rights or abortion or whatever, its LGBT, thats not a belief, or a view. So if you’re gonna seriously stop using the website over human decency & compassion during pride month, thats on you if ya wanna be a whining mope

The amount of offended people in these comments is killing me 😂 much love, GoDaddy. Happy pride. To all the high- strung offended snowflakes: you and your kind have enjoyed thousands of years without LGBT visibility. One site changes their profile pic and your anger burns for nothing. Suck it.

And there were plenty of ambivalent comments.

I am ok with supporting LGBT rights. I am not ok with my slow as hell server that I paid extra for it to be fast, but I paid up front for 3 years so whatever I guess I am hanging out awhile.

While I generally tend to steer away from stories about bogus, whipped-up, social media controversies (this is maybe the third time DI has posted such an article) I find it interesting as it reflects GoDaddy’s perception shift as a company.
A large reason GoDaddy got into the leading position it is today is due to its unabashedly breast-based advertising and sponsorship of sports only Republicans understand.
Less than a decade ago, it was more common for the company to attract controversy when founding CEO Bob Parsons did something dumb like brag about shooting an elephant.
Now it’s taking flak for making a half-assed nod towards gay rights? How times change.
Disclosure: it’s not lost of me that throughout this article I’ve used the word “gay” interchangeably with “LGBT”.

Failure to launch: 10 years-old gTLDs that are still dormant

Over six years after the last new gTLD application window closed, more than one in 10 new gTLDs have yet to launch, even though some have been delegated for over four years.
Once you filter out duplicates, withdrawals and terminations from the original 1,930 applications, there were a maximum of roughly 1,300 potential new gTLDs from the 2012 round.
But, by my calculations, 144 of those have yet to even get around to their sunrise period. Most of those haven’t even filed their launch plans with ICANN yet.
Here’s 10 from that list I’ve picked based on how interesting they appear to me, in no particular order.
Yes, DI is doing listicles now. Hate-mail to the usual address.
.forum
This one’s owned by Jay Westerdal’s Top Level Spectrum, the same company behind .feedback, .realty and others. I quite like the potential of this string — the internet is chock-full of forums due to the easy availability of open-source forum software — but so far nobody’s gotten to register one. It was delegated back in June 2015 and doesn’t have a published launch plan as yet. An FAQ reading just saying “Jay was here !!!!! Test deploy..delete me later…” has been up on its site since at least last September. TLS is also sitting on .contact and .pid (for “personal ID”) with no launch dates in sight.
.scholarships
Owned by Scholarships.com, there’s a whiff of the defensive about this one. It’s been in the root since March 2015 but its site states the registry “is still finishing launch plans and will provide updates as they become available”. Scholarships.com is a site that connects would-be higher education students to potential sources of funding. It’s difficult to imagine many ways the matching gTLD could possibly help in that mission.
.giving
JustGiving, the UK-based charity campaign aggregator, won this gTLD and had it delegated in August 2015, but seemingly still hasn’t figured out what it wants to do with it. It’s not a dot-brand, so it’s presumably mulling over ways to give .giving domains to fundraisers in a way that does not compromise credibility. Whatever its plans, it’s taking its sweet time over them.
.cancerresearch
This is a weird one. Delegated four years ago, the Australian Cancer Research Foundation rather quickly went live with a bunch of interlinked .cancerresearch web sites, using its contractually permitted allotment of promotional domains. Contractually, it’s not a dot-brand, but it’s basically acting like one, having never actually given ICANN any info about sunrise, eligibility, trademark claims, general availability, etc. Technically, it’s still pre-launch, and I can’t see any reason why it would want to budge from that status. Huge loophole in the ICANN rules?
.beauty
Another whiff of gaming here. International woman-shaming powerhouse L’Oreal still has no announced plans to launch .beauty, .skin or .hair, which it had originally wanted to run as so-called “closed generics” (presumably to keep the keywords out of the hands of competitors). Of its small portfolio of generic gTLDs, delegated in 2016, it has actually launched .makeup already, with a $6,000 retail price and a strategy seemingly based on registry-owned domains matching the names of makeup-focused social media influencers. At least it’s actually selling names, even if nobody’s bought one yet.
.budapest
One of three city TLDs that were delegated back in 2014 but have yet to start selling domains. MMX is to run it in partnership with the local government of the Hungarian city, if it ever gets off the ground. Madrid (.madrid) and Zurich (.zuerich) have both also yet to roll out, although Zurich has settled on early 2019 for its launch.
.fan
Regular DI readers won’t be surprised to see this one on the list. In what may turn out to be a shocking waste of money, .fans registry Asiamix Digital acquired the singular .fan from Donuts back in 2015 and promptly let it sit idle for the next three years. Currently, with .fans turning out to be a flop, Asiamix has money troubles and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it under new ownership before too long. It’s not a terrible string, so there’s some potential there.
.ком, etc
.ком is one of 11 internationalized domain name transliterations of .com — .कॉम, .ком, .点看, .คอม, .नेट, .닷컴, .大拿, .닷넷, .コム, .كوم and .קוֹם — that Verisign had delegated back in 2015. To date, only the Japanese .コム has launched, and the registry reportedly arsed it up quite badly. Records show .コム peaked at over 28,000 names and sits at fewer than 7,000 today. None of the remaining IDNs have launch dates attached.
Anything owned by Google or Amazon
When it comes to sitting on dormant gTLDs, you can’t top Google and Amazon for sheer numbers. Google has 19 strings in pre-launch states right now, while Amazon has a whopping 34. Amazon is letting the likes of .free, .wow, .now, .deal, .save and .secure sit idle, while Google is still stroking its chin on the likes of .eat, .meme, .fly and .channel. At the snail’s pace these companies roll out gTLDs, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these strings never hit the market.
.bom
Portuguese for “.good”, .bom was delegated to local ccTLD registry Nic.br in 2015 but has no published launch dates and no content on its nic.bom registry web site. I’d say more, but I expect a certain prolific DI commenter could do a better job of it, so I’ll turn it over to him…

Another failing new gTLD stopped paying its dues

Another new gTLD registry has been slapped with an ICANN breach notice after failing to pay its fees.
California-based dotCOOL, which runs .qpon, seems to be at least six months late in making its $6,250 quarterly payment to ICANN, according to the notice (pdf).
It’s perhaps not surprising. The TLD has been live since mid-2014 and yet has failed to top more than about 650 simultaneous domains under management, at least 100 of which were registry-owned.
Right now, its zone file contains about 470 domains.
It typically sells new domains in the single digits each month, with retail prices in the $15 to $20 range.
With that volume and the inferred registry fee, a full year’s revenue probably wouldn’t cover one quarter of ICANN fees.
The string “qpon” is a pun on “coupon”. The idea was that companies would use the TLD to push discount coupons on their customers.
But they didn’t.
The number of live sites indexed by Google is in the single figures and none of them are using .qpon for its intended purpose.
ICANN’s breach notice also demands the company start publishing a DNSSEC Practice Statement on its registry web site, but that seems like the least of its worries.
As a novel, non-dictionary string, I worry that .qpon may struggle to find a buyer.
Last week, .fan and .fans, both operated by Asiamix Digital, got similar breach notices from ICANN.

I just bought a new gTLD registry’s domain for $10

Are .fan and .fans the latest new gTLDs to go out of business? It certainly looks that way.
ICANN has hit the registry with a breach notice for unpaid dues and stripped it of its registrar accreditation.
In addition, its web sites no longer appear functional and I’ve just bought its official IANA-listed domain name for under $10.
Asiamix Digital is the Hong Kong-based company behind both TLDs, doing business as dotFans.
It launched .fans in September 2015, with retail pricing up around the $100 mark, but never actually got around to launching the singular variant, which it acquired (defensively?) from Rightside (now Donuts) earlier that year.
.fans had fewer than 1,400 domains in its zone file yesterday, down from a peak of around 1,500, while .fan had none.
dotFans in-house accredited registrar, Fan Domains, didn’t seem to actually sell any domains and it got terminated by ICANN (pdf) at the end of March for failing to provide basic registrar services.
And now it seems the registry itself has been labeled as a deadbeat by ICANN Compliance, which has filed a breach notice (pdf) alleging non-payment of registry fees.
While breach notices against TLD registries are not uncommon these days, I think this is the first one I’ve seen alleging non-payment and nothing else.
The notice claims that the registry’s legal contact’s email address is non-functional.
In addition, the domains nic.fans, nic.fan and dotfans.com all currently resolve to dead placeholder pages.
Meanwhile, dotfans.net, the company’s official domain name as listed in the IANA database now belongs to me, kinda.
It expired March 12, after which it was promptly placed into a GoDaddy expired domains auction. Where I just bought it for £6.98 ($9.92).

To be clear, I do not currently control the domain. It’s still in post-expiration limbo and GoDaddy support tells me the original owner still has eight days left to reclaim it.
After that point, maybe I’ll start getting the registry’s hate mail from ICANN. Or perhaps not; it seems to have been using the .com equivalent for its formal communications.
Should .fan and .fans get acquired by another registry soon — which certainly seems possible — rest assured I’ll let the domain go for a modest sum.

Stéphane Van Gelder dies after motorcycle accident

I’m very sad to report that domain name industry veteran and ICANN community leader Stéphane Van Gelder has died. He was 51.
Friends tell me he died today of injuries sustained in a vehicle crash in Switzerland near the Italian border.
According to a local report, he and his wife were hit by a car March 23, while stopped on their motorcycles at a traffic light.
His wife, Julie, was also injured but survived.
Stéphane was a long-time member of the industry, in 1999 co-founding the French registrar Indom, which he sold to Group NBT in 2010.
After Indom, he became an independent consultant, first under the brand Stéphane Van Gelder Consulting, later as Milathan.
He joined new gTLD registry StartingDot in 2014 and saw the company through to its acquisition by Afilias in 2016.
He told us at the time of his rebranding that the name “Milathan” was a “derivative of words in Hindi that mean ‘union’ or ‘meeting’ in the sense of bringing people together”.
It was perhaps an appropriate name, given Stéphane’s record of successful senior leadership positions in the ICANN volunteer community.
Notably, he chaired the GNSO Council for two years from 2010, and was chair of the Nominating Committee from 2015.
His most recent social media posts show that he was on a motorcycle tour of Italy with his wife before his accident near Lake Como.
Stéphane and I were not close, but in our interactions I always found him knowledgeable, witty, and charming. A thoroughly nice guy.
He was also one of the very few people in the industry I’ve trusted enough to write guest posts for DI over the years. Here he is fighting the GNSO’s corner in 2012.
Stéphane is survived by his wife and, friends tell me, two children. They have our condolences, and we wish his wife a speedy recovery.
He will be missed.

ICANN strikes back at “offensive” .gay bidder

ICANN has responded harshly to claims that a probe of its handling of applications for the .gay gTLD was fixed from the outset.
Writing to dotgay LLC lawyer Arif Ali this week, ICANN lawyer Kate Wallace said claims that the investigation “had a pre-determined outcome in mind” were “as offensive as they are baseless”.
FTI Consulting gave ICANN the all-clear in January, dismissing allegations that ICANN staff had interfered with Community Priority Evaluations of .gay and other gTLDs conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit.
But dotgay quickly responded by calling the FTI report a “whitewash”, saying “a strong case could be made that the purported investigation was undertaken with a pre-determined outcome in mind.”
Now, in an unusually pointed letter (pdf) Wallace calls dotgay out for its “insulting” implications.

While dotgay LLC may have preferred a different evaluation process and may have desired a different outcome, that is not evidence that FTI undertook its investigation “with a pre-determined outcome in mind.”
Your accusations in this regard are as offensive as they are baseless. The Board initiated the CPE Process Review in its oversight role of the New gTLD Program to provide greater transparency into the CPE process. There was no pre-determined outcome in mind and FTI was never given any instruction that it was expected to come to one conclusion over another.
…
Your assertions that FTI would blatantly violate best investigative practices and compromise its integrity is insulting and without any support, and ICANN rejects them unequivocally.

Wallace works for ICANN outside counsel Jones Day — which contracted with FTI for the investigation — but states that she is writing at the behest of the ICANN board of directors.
The board “is in the process of considering the issues” raised by Ali and gay rights expert lawyer William Eskridge, she wrote.
The board’s agendas for next week’s ICANN 61 public meeting in Puerto Rico have not yet been published.
dotgay wants to avoid a costly (or lucrative) auction against other .gay applicants by gaining “community” status, but it failed its CPE in 2014, largely because its definition of “gay” over-stretches, and has been appealing the decision ever since.

dotgay lawyer insists it is gay enough for .gay gTLD

What do Airbnb, the Stonewall riots and the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting have in common?
They’re all cited in a lengthy, somewhat compelling memo from a Yale law professor in support of dotgay LLC’s argument that it should be allowed to proceed with its .gay gTLD application unopposed by rival applicants.
The document (pdf), written by William Eskridge, who has decades of publications on gay rights under his belt, argues that dotgay’s Community Priority Evaluation and the subsequent review of that evaluation were both flawed.
At the crux of the dispute is whether the word “gay” can also be used to describe people who are transgender, intersex, and “allied” straight — dotgay says it can, but the Economist Intelligence Unit, which carried out the CPE, disagreed.
dotgay scored 10 out of 16 points on its CPE, four shy of a passing grade. An acceptance of dotgay’s definition of the “gay” community could have added 1 to 4 extra points to its score.
The company also lost a point due to an objection from a gay community center, despite otherwise broad support from gay-oriented organizations.
Eskridge spends quite a lot of time on the history of the word “gay”, from Gertrude Stein and Cary Grant using it as a wink-wink code-word in less-tolerant times, via the 1969 Stonewall riots, to today’s use in the media.
The argument gets a bit grisly when it is pointed out that some of the 49 people killed in the 2016 mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida — routinely described as a “gay” club in the media — were either transgender or straight.

My research associates and I read dozens of press and Internet accounts of this then-unprecedented mass assault by a single person on American soil. Almost all of them described Pulse as a “gay bar,” the situs for the gay community. But, like the Stonewall thirty-seven years earlier, Pulse was a “gay bar” and a “gay community” that included lesbians, bisexual men and women, transgender persons, queer persons, and allies, as well as many gay men.

Eskridge argues that EIU erred by applying an overly strict definition of the applied-for string with dotgay, but not with successful community applicants for other strings.
For example, he argues, a manufacturer of facial scrubs would qualify for a “.spa” domain, and Airbnb and the Orient Express train line would qualify for “.hotel” domains under that applicant’s definition of its community, even though it could be argued that they do not fit into the narrow categories of “spas” and “hotels”.
Similarly, a transgender person may not consider themselves “gay” and a straight person certainly would not, but both might feel a part of the broader “gay community” when they get shot at a gay nightclub.
It’s an unpleasant way to frame the argument, but in my view it’s compelling nevertheless.
Eskridge also thinks that dotgay should have picked up an extra point or two in the part of the CPE dealing with community support.
It dropped one point there because the Q Center, a community center for LGBTQ people in Portland, Oregon, sent a letter objecting to the dotgay application (an objection apparently later revoked, then reinstated).
Eskridge spend some time questioning the Q Center’s bona fides as a big-enough organization to warrant costing dotgay a point, noting that it was the only member of a 200-strong umbrella organization, CenterLink, to object. CenterLink itself backed the bid.
He then goes on to cite articles seemingly showing that Q Center was in the midst of some kind of liberal paranoia meltdown — accused of racial insensibility and “transphobia” — and allegations of mismanagement at about the same time as it was objecting to dotgay’s application.
He also insinuates that Q’s base in Portland is suspicious because it’s also where rival applicant Top Level Design is based.
In summary, Eskridge reckons the EIU CPE and FTI Consulting’s subsequent investigation were both flimsy in their research, unfairly applying criteria to .gay that they did not apply to other strings, and that dotgay should have picked up enough points to pass the CPE.
It’s important to remember that this is not a case of ICANN getting decide whether the gTLD .gay gets to exist — it’s going to exist one way or the other — but rather whether the winning registry is selected by auction or not.
If dotgay wins either by getting another CPE or winning the auction then .gay will be restricted to only vetted members of the “gay” community. This could mean less homophobic abuse in .gay domains but probably also less opportunity for self expression.
If it goes to Top Level Design, MMX or Donuts, it will be open to all comers. That could increase cyber-bulling with .gay domains, but would remove barriers to entry to those who would otherwise be excluded from registering a domain.
ICANN has had .gay on hold for years while the dispute over the CPE has worked itself out, and it now has a piece of paper from FTI declaring the result hunky-dory. I doubt there’s any appetite to reopen old wounds.
My feeling is that we’re looking at an auction here.

CPE probe: “whitewash” or “fig leaf”?

A few weeks ago, when I was reporting the conclusions of a probe into ICANN’s new gTLD program, I wrote a prediction on a piece of paper and placed it into a sealed envelope.*
I wrote: “They’re gonna call this a whitewash.”
And I was correct! Ta-dah! I’m here all week.
The lawyer for applicants for .music and .gay gTLDs has written to ICANN to complain that a purportedly independent review of the Community Evaluation Process was riddled with errors and oversights and should not be trusted.
In a letter on behalf of dotgay LLC, Arif Ali calls the report a “whitewash”. In a letter on behalf of DotMusic, he calls it a “fig leaf”.
Both companies think that the CPE probe was designed to give ICANN cover to proceed with auctions for five outstanding gTLD contention sets, rather than to get to the bottom of perceived inconsistencies in the process.
Both of Ali’s clients applied for their respective gTLDs as “community” applicants, trying to avoid auctions by using the Community Priority Evaluation process.
During their CPEs, both carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit, neither applicant scored highly enough to win the exclusive right to .gay or .music, meaning the next stage was to auction the strings off to the highest bidder.
After repeated complaints from applicants and an Independent Review Process finding that ICANN lacked transparency and that staff may have had inappropriate influence over the EIU, ICANN hired FTI Consulting to look into the whole CPE process.
FTI’s report was finally delivered late last year, clearing ICANN on all counts of impropriety and finding that the EIU’s evaluations had been consistent across each of the applications it looked at.
The remaining gTLDs affected by this are .music, .gay, .hotel, .cpa, and .merck.
ICANN’s board of directors is due to meet to discuss next steps this weekend, but Ali says that it should “critically evaluate the [FTI] Report and not accept its wholesale conclusions”. He wrote, on behalf of DotMusic:

The report reveals that FTI’s investigation was cursory at best; its narrow mandate and evaluation methodology were designed to do little more than vindicate ICANN’s administration of the CPE process.
…
It is evident that FTI engaged in a seemingly advocacy-driven investigation to reach conclusions that would absolve ICANN of the demonstrated and demonstrable problems that afflicted the CPE process.

Among the applicants’ list of complaints: their claim that FTI did not interview affected applicants or take their submissions seriously, and the fact that ICANN was less than transparent about who was conducting the probe and what its remit was.
The same letter quotes ICANN chair Cherine Chalaby, then vice-chair, saying in a January 2017 webinar that he had observed inconsistencies in how the CPEs were carried out; inconsistencies FTI has since found did not occur.
That should be enough to provoke discussion when the board meets to discuss this and other issues in Los Angeles on Saturday.
* I didn’t actually do this of course, I just thought about it, but you get my point.

Three ways ICANN could gut Whois

ICANN has published three possible models of how Whois could be altered beyond recognition after European privacy law kicks in this May.
Under each model, casual Whois users would no longer have access to the wealth of contact information they do under the current system.
There may also be a new certification program that would grant access to full Whois records to law enforcement, consumer protection agencies and intellectual property interests.
The three models are each intended to address the General Data Protection Regulation, EU law that could see companies fined millions if they fail to protect the personal data of European citizens.
While GDPR affects all data collection on private citizens, for the domain name industry it’s particularly relevant to Whois, where privacy has always been an afterthought.
The three ICANN models, which are now subject to a short public comment period, differ from each other in three key areas: who has their privacy protected, which fields appear in public Whois by default, and how third parties such as law enforcement access the full records.
Model 1 is the most similar to the current system, allowing for the publication of the most data.
Under this model the name and postal address of the registrant would continue to be displayed in the public Whois databases.
Their email address and phone number would be protected, but the email and phone of the administrative and technical contacts — often the same person as the registrant — would be published.
If the registrant were a legal entity, rather than a person, all data fields would continue to be displayed as normal.
The other two models call for more restricted, or at least different, public output.
Under Model 2, the email addresses of the administrative and technical contacts would be published, but all other contact information, including the name of the registrant, would be redacted.
Model 3 proposes a crazy-sounding system whereby everything would be published unless the registrar/registry decided, on a domain-by-domain basis, that the field contained personal information.
This would require manual vetting of each Whois record and is likely to gather no support from the industry.
The three models also differ in how third parties with legitimate interests would access full Whois records.
Model 1 proposes a system similar to how zone files are published via ICANN’s Centralized Zone Data Service.
Under this model, users would self-certify that they have a legit right to the data (if they’re a cop or an IP lawyer, for example) and it would be up to the registry or registrar to approve or decline their request.
Model 2 envisages a more structured, formal, centralized system of certification for Whois users, developed with the Governmental Advisory Committee and presumably administered by ICANN.
Model 3 would require Whois users to supply a subpoena or court order in order to access records, which is sure to make it unpopular among the IP lobby and governments.
Each of the three models also differs in terms of the circumstances under which privacy is provided.
The models range from protecting records only when the registrant, registry, registrar or any other entity involved in the data processing has a presence in the European Economic Area to protecting records of all registrants everywhere regardless of whether they’re a person or a company.
Each model has different data retention policies, ranging from six month to two years after a registration expires.
None of the three models screw with registrars’ ability to pass data to thick-Whois registries, nor to their data escrow providers.
ICANN said it’s created these models based on the legal analyses it commissioned from the Hamilton law firm, as well as submissions from community members.
One such submission, penned by the German trade associated Eco, has received broad industry support.
It would provide blanket protection to all registrants regardless of legal status or location, and would see all personally identifiable information stripped from public Whois output.
Upon carrying out a Whois query, users would see only information about the domain, not the registrant.
There would be an option to request more information, but this would be limited to an anonymized email address or web form for most users.
Special users, such as validated law enforcement or IP interests, would be able to access the full records via a new, centralized Trusted Data Clearinghouse, which ICANN would presumably be responsible for setting up.
It’s most similar to ICANN’s Model 2.
It has been signed off by registries and registrars together responsible for the majority of the internet’s domain registrations: Afilias, dotBERLIN, CentralNic, Donuts, Neustar, Nominet, Public Interest Registry (PIR), Verisign, 1&1, Arsys, Blacknight, GoDaddy, Strato/Cronon, Tucows and United Domains.
ICANN said in a blog post that its three models are now open for public comment until January 29.
If you have strong opinions on any of the proposals, it might be a good idea to get them in as soon as possible, because ICANN plans to identify one of the models as the basis for the official model within 48 hours of the comment period closing.

Shocker! After 15 years, Afilias kicks Neustar out of Australia

Afilias has been awarded the contract to run .au, Australia’s ccTLD, kicking out incumbent Neustar after 15 years.
It’s currently a 3.1 million-domain contract, meaning it’s going to be the largest back-end transition in the history of the DNS.
It’s also very likely going to see the price of a .au domain come down.
Neustar, via its 2015 acquisition of AusRegistry, has been the back-end provider for .au since 2002. That deal is now set to end July 1, 2018.
auDA, the ccTLD manager, said today that Afilias was selected from a shortlist of three bidders, themselves whittled down from the initial pool of nine.
It’s not been disclosed by auDA who the other shortlisted bidders were, and Afilias execs said they do not know either. I suspect Neustar would have been one of them.
The contract was put up for bidding in May, after auDA and Neustar failed to come to terms on a renewal.
At 3.1 million domains under management, .au is currently bigger than .org was when Afilias took over the back-end from Verisign in 2003.
Back then, .org was at 2.7 million names. It’s now at over 10 million.
“It’s the biggest transition ever, but not by much,” Afilias chief marketing officer Roland LaPlante said.
CTO Ram Mohan said that it should actually be easily than the .org transition, which had the added wrinkle of switching registrars from Verisign’s legacy RPP protocol to the now-standard EPP.
auDA said that Afilias will start reaching out to the 40-odd current .au registrars about the transition “as early as this week”.
About half of registrars are already on Afilias’ back-end and about half are ICANN-accredited, LaPlante said.
“We don’t expect to have many changes for registrars, but we have plenty of time to prepare them for what is needed,” Mohan said. “It ought to be a fairly easy glide path.”
There will be a live test environment for registrars to integrate with prior to the formal handover, he said.
There are several local presence requirements to the contract, so Afilias will open up a 20-person office in Melbourne headed by current VP of corporate services John Kane, who will shortly move there.
The company will also have to open a data center there, as the contract requires all data to be stored in-country.
Mohan, LaPlante and Kane said they’re all jumping on planes to Melbourne tonight to begin transition talks with local interested parties.
Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed right now, but LaPlante said that .au registrars should see prices come down. This could lead to lower prices for registrants.
They currently pay AUD 17.50 ($13.44) per domain for a two-year registration, and I believe Neustar’s cut is currently around the $5 (USD) per year mark.
Afilias is not known for being a budget-end back-end provider, but it seems its slice of the pie will be smaller than Neustar’s.
LaPlante said that fees charged to registrars will be set by auDA, but that it now has flexibility to reduce prices that it did not have under the incumbent.
“Some savings should flow down to registrars as part of this,” he said.
The term of the contract is “four or five years” with options to renew for additional years, he said.
The loss of .au has no doubt come as a blow to Neustar, which paid $87 million for AusRegistry parent Bombrra just two years ago.
While Bombora also had dozens of new gTLD clients, many dot-brands, .au was undoubtedly its key customer.