ARI wins three Aussie geo-gTLD contracts
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.
Aussies to apply for four geo-TLDs
The Australian state governments of New South Wales and Victoria have put out a tender for a registry provider for up to four new top-level domains.
They want to apply to ICANN next year for geographic gTLDs including .victoria, .sydney, .melbourne and possibly .nsw, according to the RFP.
The new gTLDs would be self-funded commercial ventures, with some names reserved for public use, it says. Revenue would be shared between the government and the operator.
If a local presence is taken into account then ARI Registry Services, which recently changed its name from AusRegistry International to dilute the perception that it was too Australia-focused, could be considered a likely front-runner for the gigs.
The tender closes November 15.
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