Afilias

Type:	Private
Industry:	Registry and Registrar
Founded:	2000
Headquarters:	Office 107 3013 Lake Drive City West Dublin 24 Ireland.
Employees:	150
Website:	http://www.afilias.info
Key People
Hal Lubsen, CEO Ram Mohan, EVP and CTO Roland LaPlante, SVP and CMO Brian Cute, VP, Discovery Services Steven Pack, Compliance officer M. Scott Hemphill, VP and General Counsel

Afilias is one of the most important internet domain registrars, having launched the .info domains in 2001. It is also one of the few gTLD registry operators today. Also important is that Afilias is the registry operators for the .mobi mobile phone TLD since 11 February 2010 . Afilias is also a service provider for a vast number of local and regional domains.

History

As an acknowledgement of the need for more competition at the registry level of the domain name industry, a number of important domain name registrars created Afilias in September 2000. Just two months later, in November 2000, Afilias was selected by ICANN to launch the .info gTLD. The success of the .info domains was huge, being considered the most successful new gTLD after the launch of .com.

The headquarters of Afilias is located in the capital city of Ireland, Dublin, as Afilias limited is an Irish company. Still, they have a large number of offices worldwide, including operational offices in New Delhi, India, an operations center in Toronto,Canada, USA offices in Philadelphia and sales offices in London, UK. Afilias Canada Corp also includes operational facilities in Ontario and sales offices in Vancouver.

Afilias is the second largest domain services provider after VeriSign, supporting over 14 million domain names, as of January 2008.

Products and services

Afilias is a domain service provider and a domain registrar.

Service provider for the following ccTLDs:

• .vc (Saint Vincent & Grenadine)
• .sc (Seychelles)
• .org (gTLD)
• .mn (Mongolia)
• .me (Montenegro)
• .lc (Saint Lucia)
• .in (India)
• .hn (Honduras)
• .gi (Gibraltar)
• .bz (Belize)
• .ag (Antigua and Barbuda)
• .aero (gTLD for the Airline and Aviation industry)
• .asia (sTLD for the region including Asia, the Pacific and Australia)
• .info
• .mobi

Interesting facts about Afilias

Arabic Internet users get native language e-mail thanks to Afilias and .JO registry

On October 29, 2010 Afilias together with the National Information Technology Center of Jordan announced that, thanks to the IDN e-mail technology of Afilias and a fully IDN domain name and IDN TLD from the .JO registry, they managed to send an e-mail message between two completely internationalized e-mail addresses in the Arabic language. The article appeared in the reputable San Francisco Chronicle

Increased DNS security thanks to Afilias

According to MyHostNews, Afilias has managed to recently increase DNS security of several ccTLDs thanks to enabling DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) to them. The ccTLDs that received DNSSEC are the following: .VC (Saint Vincent and the Grenadines), .LC (St. Lucia), .HN (Honduras), .BZ (Belize) and .AG (Antigua and Barbuda). The important event took place on 5 October 2010.

Afilias makes .org domains safer

The cyberspace security has been under attack by a number of threats, including DNS redirection, cache poisoning, pharming and phising. In order to counter these problems, Afilias has enabled DNSSEC for the .org TLD.

External links

• Afilias website
• About Afilias

Top-Level Domain