Over the last few days, I’ve spoken with some living legends in the domain name Registrar industry to put this information together.
Identity Digital Australia Pty Ltd is the company that runs the registry for .auDA (au Domain Administration). They have servers that maintain the connection between the EPP API and the database where all the information is housed for “.au” domains. Identity Digital used to be called Afilias and took over running the Australian domain Registry in the year 2017 from AusRegistry. Identity Digital appear to have been doing a good job (on the whole) of looking after the .au domain name space.
Identity Digital also maintains the root DNS and whois servers that serve all of the requests for all of the “.au” domains. This is not to be trivialized as there are huge technical demands on ensuring that the whois servers are up and operational at all times. Any disruption in these systems sees outages and Australian websites going down across the world.
Recently Identity Digital released a document that describes some big changes that are coming. We here at Assets Australia thought it would be worthwhile to break down some of these changes and how they will affect Registrars.
Change 01
Up to 40 concurrent sessions to the EPP service (previously it was 20)
This is a significant change. Normally a Registrar needs less than 5 connections to the Registry to do most of its work. Unless they are a large Registry that is hitting the Registry harder than normal.
The following Registrars have purchased additional Registry connections for access and use to provide their services:
Synergy Wholesale – 20 additional registry connections
Terrific.com.au – 20 additional registry connections
Go Daddy – 10 additional registry connections.
Understandably, Synergy and Godaddy would need additional connections, but you can see here Terrific has requested an additional 20 connections.
Apart from Registrars being able to register domain names quickly for their customers and resellers, the other use for their Registry connection is “Drop Catching”. This is when a Registrar sends hundreds of requests per second to register an Expired Domain Name as soon as it is released to the public.
As we’ve written about many times on this website, there is currently only one single Company (with many Registrars), in Australia, and the world, that provides a public Drop Catching service with a Registry connection. auDA (governing body) has refused to allow any new Registrars to connect to the Australian Registry since 2016.
When the only current drop catcher service (that’s connected to the Registry) needs to pick up a domain name, they load up all of their connections with create requests so that they can try to catch domain names. Terrific (a private Registrar who doesn’t currently offer public drop-catching services) probably purchased additional connections so that they could have more chances at catching domain names for themselves, which they do privately, from time to time.
Any Registrar that has access to multiple Registrars (owned by the same company) effectively double the number of connections, per additional Registrar they own. This means that if there are competitive Registrars all vying to catch valuable premium domain names that have expired, they’ll have a better chance of catching them if they have more Registry connections than their competitors. However, like we said before, there is currently no public competitor to catching expired Australian domain names for Drop.com.au(.)
Now if there were not a monopoly in the drop catching industry this would be a shake-up. The monopoly would suddenly be a lot stronger. A company with 10 registrars would go from 200 to 400 connections whereas a company like Terrific would go from 40 to 60.
But…
Identity Digital is also releasing a second important change…
Change 02
Registrar IP subnets should be unique, and not overlap with any other registrar IP subnets across the registry.
This is a real game changer and it will ONLY affect the Registrars that have multiple Registrars with Registry connections.
It means that if some software ran on a single server used multiple connections to the Registry, then it would need to have every single registrar connection on its own unique IP. It will mean that the software either needs to be broken up onto different servers or have a multi-IP server that is very specific about each connection to the Registry. This means, that because there is currently a monopoly on the drops, and only one company offering a public drop-catching service, then that company only needs to run its drop-catching service from one registrar (with 40 connections). If they need more grunt then it will need some software updates.
In conclusion, the evolution of Identity Digital, formerly known as Afilias, within the “.au” domain space showcases a proactive approach to managing the technical infrastructure vital to Australia’s internet ecosystem. Their recent announcement of increasing concurrent sessions to the EPP service signifies a step towards enhancing efficiency and scalability for Registrars, particularly those engaged in drop catching.
The decision to allow up to 40 concurrent sessions, up from 20, is noteworthy, as it directly impacts Registrar operations and strategies. The move reflects an understanding of the evolving demands within the domain industry, with registrars like Synergy Wholesale, Terrific.com.au, and GoDaddy already investing in additional connections to optimise their services.
However, the requirement for unique Registrar IP subnets introduces a significant shift for companies with multiple Registrars. This mandate necessitates a reevaluation of software architecture, potentially leading to the segregation of services across different servers or the development of specialised multi-IP servers. This change is especially pertinent in the context of drop catching, where efficient use of registrar connections is crucial.
Ultimately, these developments underscore the dynamic nature of domain management and the continuous efforts by Identity Digital to ensure a robust and reliable .au domain name space for all Australian stakeholders. As technology and industry practices evolve, adapting to these changes remains essential for maintaining a competitive edge and delivering optimal services to end-users.
