From the 1st July the management of Australian domain names is changing with Afilias becoming the new body responsible for the management of all Australian country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), such as .com.au, .org.au etc.
For more than a decade AusRegistry was responsible for the .au online space and oversaw the growth of domains from around 310,000 to today’s 3.125 million. However, in 2017, auDA (AU Domain Administration) conducted a tender process to select a new registry operator and, from the nine responses received, chose Afilias as the new body to oversee the management of this market.
Afilias already supports 13 other ccTLDs and the company has been around since 2001 with the launch of .info domains. They are also the world’s second largest domain name registry provider with over 21 million names under management, including .org (10.372 million domain names) and .info (5.917 million).
Afilias has been installing new DNS ‘nodes’ across Australia and setting up a 20-person office in Melbourne, specifically for .au registry operations. For website owners, there should be no noticeable change from this transition.
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