Tucows will become the new technical operator of the Indian ccTLD, .IN, replacing GoDaddy. Domain Incite notes how quietly and matter-of-factly Tucows CEO Elliot Noss revealed the news. Information about the contract with the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), which manages the Indian domain zone, was placed on page 4 of Noss’s report on the performance in the last year’s fourth quarter.
Meanwhile, it is an important and even exceptional event: the upcoming change of .IN’s technical operator will be the largest migration of domain names in the history of the DNS system. Previously, the record was held by the transfer of .AU, the Australian ccTLD, from Neustar to Afilias, with the domain zone having some 3.1 million registrations at the time. NIXI has not provided information on the number of domains registered in .IN. However, according to the last Domain Name Industry Brief from Verisign, there were about 4.1 million registrations in India’s ccTLD as of the end of 2024.
It is unknown how Tucows won the competition against GoDaddy, .IN’s previous technical operator. It would be logical to assume that the management cost it offered was lower. Observers note that large contracts like this are rarely very profitable for technical operators. However, they certainly increase the authority and strengthen the reputation of companies, allowing them to count on new profitable deals in the future.
