AusRegistry

» see ausregistry.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Somebody has to hold the file. Every .com.au and .net.au address in Australia exists because one company keeps the authoritative list of them and answers when a registrar asks to add another. From 2002 until 1 July 2018 that company was AusRegistry, based in Melbourne, and it sold nothing whatsoever to the public.

The arrangement started with a tender. auDA, the body that administers the Australian namespace, ran an open process in 2002 and AusRegistry won a four-year contract. In 2005 it won a second open tender covering another four years from 1 July 2006. Then in February 2009 auDA extended the registry agreement out to 2014 with no tender bid at all, which was controversial at the time and after which the arrangement started to look permanent. Accounts of the company's own founding differ between 2000 and 2002, and 2002 is the year with a contract behind it.

It was never a household name, and nothing about the business required it to be. Its customers were registrars, its product was a protocol endpoint, and the only way an ordinary user ever met it was by failing to notice anything. Its own technical boast was EPP compliance and being among the first ccTLD operators to push updates into the zone files quickly.

~ the case file ~

~ what a registry actually does ~

A registry is not a registrar. The registrar is the company you pay and argue with, and the registry is the single database sitting underneath all of them, one per namespace by definition. A 2012 report put 99 percent of registered Australian domains inside three second-level spaces, with .com.au far ahead of the rest, so one database was doing the work of an index for the whole Australian commercial web.

The side businesses show how transferable the skill was. An international arm trading as ARI Registry Services sold the same operation to namespaces abroad, and from 2005 to 2010 the company ran the Renewable Energy Certificates Registry under contract to the Australian government, because a registry of certificates and a registry of domain names are the same problem with different objects inside it.

~ the tender of 2017 ~

Ownership moved first. In July 2015 Neustar announced it had bought Bombora Technologies, the parent holding AusRegistry, in a deal reported variously at eighty-seven and at a hundred and eighteen million dollars, and Adrian Kinderis, who had founded the company, went into Neustar as a vice-president. In December 2016 Neustar itself was agreed away to Golden Gate Capital for about 2.9 billion dollars, with Singapore's sovereign fund taking a minority position.

In December 2017 auDA announced the outcome of a competitive tender for the registry contract, and after sixteen years the incumbent had lost it. Afilias, an Irish-registered operator, took over the .au registry on 1 July 2018. The transition ran to schedule, and the reporting at the time recorded no interruption to websites or email.

~ after the handover ~

ausregistry.com.au stayed up well past the handover. The archived captures hold the site at about 34 kilobytes through 10 May 2018 and drop it to 28 kilobytes on 30 June, the day before the changeover. That smaller version then kept answering for nearly two more years. The first redirect shows up on 21 May 2020, a month or so after GoDaddy announced it was buying Neustar's registry business. Today both ausregistry.com.au and ausregistry.com land on GoDaddy Registry's domain hub, a page that does not contain the word AusRegistry anywhere on it.

The same job in Turkey belonged to a university. nic.tr, operated under Middle East Technical University in Ankara, administered .tr from 1991, and METU signed the handover to the telecoms regulator on 21 December 2018, less than six months after Australia's changeover. The replacement system, TRABİS, went live on 14 September 2022. In both countries what changed hands was a list everybody depended on and almost nobody could name.

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