Afilias

General Information
Industry:	Registry, Registrar
Stakeholder Group:	Business
Issue Areas:	DNS
Country:	USA
Founded:	2000
Headquarters:	300 Welsh Rd Building 3, Suite 105 Horsham, PA 19044
Website:	https://www.afilias.info
Twitter:	[@Afilias Twitter]

People

Hal Lubsen, CEO Jonathan Robinson, Executive Chairman Huw Spiers, Chief Financial Officer Ram Mohan, EVP and CTO Roland LaPlante, SVP and CMO Steven Pack, Compliance officer M. Scott Hemphill, VP and General Counsel John Kane, VP of Corporate Services Chris Campbell, Director of Business Development Michaela Cruden, Director of Business Development - Europe Kroopa Shah, Accounts Manager Doug McDonald, Sales Executive Steve Heflin, VP of Sales

Afilias is the world’s second-largest Internet domain name registry, with more than 20 million names under management. Afilias is a US Multinational Corporation with international headquarters in Pennsylvania. It launched the .info gTLD in 2001. In February 2010, Afilias took ownership of the Registry Operator for the .mobi mobile phone TLD, mTLD Top Level Domain Ltd. It helped found the dotMobi company and provided early technical assistance to the company. In January 2012, Afilias acquired Registry Services Corporation, which until that time had been the registry for the .pro TLD.

Afilias supports the technical back-end of many TLDs, including nine gTLDs, the largest of which is .org. In total, their systems currently support more than 20 million registrations.

On December 29, 2020, Donuts, the global leader in next-generation TLDs, completed its acquisition of Afilias' registry. Together, they will support over 25 million domain names spanning over 400 TLDs. Although now under one corporate structure, the two companies continue to operate without apparent changes for registrars or registry services clients. The transaction did not include Afilias’ registrar businesses or mobile software (DeviceAtlas, DeviceAssure, MobiReady, and MobiForge).

Background

Acknowledging the need for more competition at the registry level of the domain name industry, a number of important domain names registrars created Afilias in September 2000. Just two months later, Afilias was selected by ICANN to launch the .info gTLD, which has been called the most successful new gTLD after the launch of .com.

The headquarters of Afilias is located in Horsham, Pennsylvania, USA. They have a large number of offices worldwide, including their former headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, operational offices in New Delhi, India, an operations center in Toronto, Canada, and sales offices in London, U.K. 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.

Afilias was the first registry to provide IDN capable email to its customers. All of its servers are DNSSEC and IPv6 capable.

.info 10 year Anniversary

On December 7, 2010, Afilias released its annual report on .info domains, which happened to coincide with the domain space's 10-year anniversary. The report detailed the general growth and increased availability of the domain. At that time, it was the number one new TLD ever to be launched and the 7th largest TLD in the world. It stood at about 6.8 million domain registrations, with about 5 million of those, or 70%, resolving to active websites. They are available through 90% of domain registrars, and the entire registration grew about 30% from the year before. It had double the registration of any other new TLD.

Sunrise Auctions

In 2012 and 2013, Afilias teamed up with GoDaddy to auction off domains that had been reserved under its Sunrise periods but whose trademarks later proved invalid. The first round of auctions produced highlights, such as Cancer.info, which sold for $16,005, and loans.info, which sold for $12,205. Together both auctions included over 235 domain names.

Products and services

Afilias is a domain service provider and a domain registrar.

Service provider for the following TLDs:

• .vc (Saint Vincent & Grenadine)
• .sc (Seychelles)
• .mn (Mongolia)
• .me (Montenegro)
• .lc (Saint Lucia)
• .in (India)
• .hn (Honduras)
• .gi (Gibraltar)
• .bz (Belize)
• .ag (Antigua and Barbuda)
• .org (gTLD)
• .aero (gTLD for the Airline and Aviation industry)
• .asia (sTLD for the region including Asia, the Pacific and Australia)
• .info (gTLD)
• .mobi (mTLD)
• .pro (gTLD)
• .xxx (gTLD)
• .post (gTLD for the postal union)
• .blue
• .red
• .pink
• .black
• .shiksha
• .kim
• .organic
• .lgbt
• .vote
• .voto
• .green
• .ltda
• .vegas
• .rich
• .hiv
• .global
• .porn
• .adult
• .archi
• .ski
• .bio

Registration Stats

In January 2011, Afilias announced that the 3-month old .xxx extension had over 200,000 registrations, which were being technically supported by Afilias. However, more than half of these were not signed into the root zone, meaning that many of the registrations were defensive acquisitions by trademark owners, or pre-blocked domains by ICM Registry that will never be resolving domains.

Afilias was able to double the registrations for .pro in just a year time, including overcoming a deep loss of 40,000 domains of zip codes that had been registered to Hostway. In January 2013, it noted that it had 160,000 domains registered. CEO Karim Jiwani notes that it is all organic growth rather than large bundled deals, and is the result from various price decreases, and on-boarding more registrars, most notably Directi. All this has happened while Afilias simultaneously got more serious about enforcing the registration policies that require professional credentials. Though this also means educating registrars that an extensive degree is not a requisite of being a professional, and a professional may be a massage therapist or tour guide.

In December, 2010, .info was the largest new gTLD, and the 7th largest TLD in the world, with about 6.8 million registrations. Afilias' Roland LaPlante has noted that "there are as many .info domains registered as all other new TLDs combined." Between 2012 and 2013, the .info TLD had a net loss of 914,310 domain registrations, which amounted to an 11% decline compared with 2011 domains. 2012 ended with 7,402,557 .info domains, still making it the leader in new gTLD total registrations despite the loss. Afilias attributed the decline to the implementation of an anti-abuse policy that took down registrations it considered as spam.

Developments

In July 2013, Afilias requested that ICANN lift the restrictions set out in its Registry Agreements for .pro and .mobi that forbids Afilias from owning more than a 15% share in the registrar company that sells the TLDs.

Other

New gTLD Contest

In October 2011, Afilias announced that it would be holding a contest to find the best new gTLD idea. The top prize would be $5,000 with other prizes going down to $1,500. Judges of the contest included Kevin Murphy of Domain Incite, former ICANN CEO Paul Twomey, and Aflias' own Roland LaPlante and Ram Mohan.

The winning extension was .know, which was billed as a platform for an online knowledge base. The two runners up were .sec, for secure websites and file transfers, and .med, for verified medical professionals.

In December 2011, Afilias publicly warned brand owners that it could be ten years after the first new gTLD application period opens in January 2011, before a second round is opened. Afilias cited the batching and delay process that will surely follow, and also the typically slow ICANN process.

ISOC Sponsorship

Afilias is a sponsor of a component of ISOC's Next Generation Leaders Programme, which is an academic and field-based program, launched in 2010 in conjunction with the DiploFoundation, intended to further the skills of promising Internet professionals and individuals working in Internet governance. Afilias specifically sponsors a fellowship with the IETF, a part of the academic portion of the NGL programme.

Opposition to SOPA

In January 2012, Afilias put a sponsored post on CircleID highlighting their opposition to SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act being considered by the U.S. Congress at that time. They noted that they do support intellectual property protections, but still regard SOPA as a threat to the integrity of the Internet. Their reasons for opposing SOPA include: the threat it poses to DNSSEC, given that ISPs would suddenly be required to interrupt the security protocol's chain of command to block or suspend domains in violation of its copyright protections; the ease at which a user could still resolve a blocked site, given that it would be the local ISP's responsibility to block infringing domains; and the many opportunities and loopholes the legislation would create for Internet criminals.

Interesting facts about Afilias

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

On October 29, 2010, Afilias and the National Information Technology Center of Jordan announced that, thanks to Afilias' IDN technology, the .jo registry managed to send an e-mail between two completely internationalized e-mail addresses in the Arabic language.

Increased DNS security thanks to Afilias Afilias has managed to implement DNSSEC for many of its ccTLDs and gTLDs. Its .org TLD was secured with DNSSEC in 2009, making it the first open TLD to implement these important security measures. On October 5th, 2010 it initiated the new security measures for .vc (Saint Vincent and the Grenadines), .lc (St. Lucia), .hn (Honduras), .bz (Belize) and .ag (Antigua and Barbuda). It has continued to transition to DNSSEC secured TLDs.

New gTLDs

In November 2011, Afilias announced that it was going to apply for both simplified and traditional Chinese IDNs for the translation of its .info domain under ICANN's new gTLD policy. This followed an announcement by their competitor Verisign that they intended to pursue IDN translations of their own .com domain.

On June 12, 2012, the company confirmed its application for a total of 305 new gTLDs; 170 of the applications are Brand TLDs, 18 IDNs, 4 Community gTLDs, 4 geographical TLDs, and the remaining 211 TLDs were applied for as Generic TLDs. Roland LaPlante, Afilias Senior Vice President and CMO, said that the company's gTLD applications are more concentrated on European strings since the company is based in the region, though its clients also come from North America and the Asia Pacific.

External links

• Afilias Website
• About Afilias

Top-Level Domain

Internet Society

Internet Service Provider

Internationalized Domain Name