Domain Incite reports that Team Internet, a British company, has become the new technical operator of the Colombian ccTLD, .CO. To be precise, the domain will be operated by a joint venture, Equipo PuntoCo, which Team Internet created with Panama-based registrar CCI REG to sign a 10-year deal with Colombia’s communications ministry, MINTIC. Radix, Identity Digital and the now former technical operator of .CO, GoDaddy, also applied for the right to operate the Colombian ccTLD.
The Colombian authorities began a large relaunch of their ccTLD in 2010, opening it for registrants from all over the world and trying to make .CO a .COM alternative. Of course, they failed to fully achieve the latter goal, but today the domain enjoys considerable popularity: it has about 3.1 million registered names. First, it was managed by .CO Internet, which was subsequently acquired by Neustar and then GoDaddy.
The decision by Colombian authorities to change the technical operator of their ccTLD appears driven by a straightforward economic rationale. Originally, as much as 93 percent of the revenue from operations in the .CO domain zone was retained by .CO Internet, leaving the Colombian government with a relatively minor share. Unsurprisingly, this arrangement soon became unsatisfactory for the state. GoDaddy was only getting 19 percent of the revenue, the rest going to the Colombian budget. Team Internet has presented the government with an even more favorable offer to the government, agreeing to operate the domain for just 8 percent of the revenue.
The upcoming migration of around 3.1 million domain names to the new operator will be the second-largest such transfer in the history of the DNS system. The largest, notably, also took place this year, when approximately 4.1 million domain names under India’s .IN domain were handed over to Tucows. Interestingly, in that case, the outgoing technical operator was GoDaddy, too – suggesting that the company may be losing ground, particularly in the national domain services market.
