Yesterday, the British company Afilias became the technical operator of Australia’s .AU national domain. Earlier, Australian domain overseer auDA put the contract for managing .au out to bid. Afilias won the contract, thus beating their rival company Neustar, who had been previously handling the domain.
Domain Name Wire notes that there are over 3.1 million names in this namespace, which made this transition to a different technical operator unprecedented in the history of the Internet. The previous record was made back in 2003, with 2.4 million org. names handed over. The then gaining registry was also Afilias. Today, Afilias manages a total of 200 top level domains with over 22 million domain names.
