.au Registry Migration Aftermath

The first day seeing Afilias as the new .AU Registry Operator is here. We are LIVE. Afilias has released the following statement, most notably stating:

The new system for .au went live on Sunday, July 1, 2018, ahead of schedule and as planned. The transition involved moving the records of over 3.1M domains from the legacy system to the new system within just a few hours. First, the legacy provider closed the registry to new transactions on Saturday morning. Then the full registry dataset was extracted, encrypted, and sent to auDA, who sent it to Afilias Australia. Afilias verified the integrity of the data, transformed it into standards-based formats, loaded it into our new, dedicated Australian systems, and conducted a comprehensive set of tests to ensure a clean system. The new registry opened for registrars early on the morning of July 1.

And auDA have been very quick to declare that everything has happened extremely smoothly, releasing their own statement on the auDA website, plus a seperate email statement (different from the website blog) that reads as follows:

The .au name space was transformed overnight with the seamless transmission of 3.1 million domain names to a new registry and national domain name infrastructure. .au Domain Administration Ltd CEO, Cameron Boardman, said the transition of the registry to Afilias Australia was a milestone in the development of Australia’s digital economy. The transition was completed on Sunday July 1, 2018, after six months of exhaustive planning and testing by auDA and Afilias working with the registrars who provide .au names to the public. This followed a comprehensive expression of interest and tender conducted in 2017 to identify the registry operator of the .au namespace for the next 4 years from 1 July, 2018. With the .au name space being an essential piece of national digital infrastructure, the new registry operator will help ensure the operational stability, security and integrity of the internet in Australia. For .au users the new infrastructure will see a national network of DNS nodes across the country which will see faster response times, increased resilience and increased security. As part of the new registry and tender process:

• .com.au, net.au, org.au, id.au, asn.au, edu.au, and gov.au names will be able to be registered for between one and five years;
• A new $12 million marketing and innovation program over 4 years to increase the awareness and use of .au; and,
• A 10 percent reduction in wholesale fees for .au names.

“The .au name space is essential national infrastructure. It forms the backbone of the digital economy”, Mr Boardman said. “The new registry will strengthen the operation and security of the .au name space so users can have confidence in the integrity and availability of .au domains.” The adoption and use of digital technologies could contribute between $140 billion and $250 billion to Australia’s GDP by 2025, according to a September 2017 federal government report. “The .au name space will play an integral part in this growth.” “auDA is now positioned to help spur this economic growth with a network and registry provided by Afilias that will give the support continued expansion of the digital economy.”

There’s no doubt that auDA have put a lot of time and effort into this transition. And at first-look, Afilias certainly haven’t made any major blunders… Over the coming week, I’m sure we will all come to the conclusion that this was a genius move by auDA, choosing an alternate company to handle the .AU Domain Name system, after AusRegistry performed a great service for 26 years… or, perhaps it was a bad move? The next week will tell all. Until we know for sure, some users are noting the WHOIS service is not currently working, and neither are expiry dates. Plus, we still don’t know when and where the daily .AU domain name dropping service is going to be working and fully functional? Some people are claiming July 15th? Afilias’ Official Domain Name Drop List doesn’t currently work… I’m sure if domainers are experiencing problems, they’ll voice their opinions below.