Afilias

Type:	Private
Industry:	Registry, Registrar
Founded:	2000
Headquarters:	2 La Touche House IFSC Dublin 1
Country:	Ireland
Employees:	150
Website:	Afilias.info
Twitter:	@Afilias
Key People
Hal Lubsen, CEO Ram Mohan, EVP and CTO Roland LaPlante, SVP and CMO Steven Pack, Compliance officer M. Scott Hemphill, VP and General Counsel Chris Campbell, Director of Business Development Kroopa Shah, Accounts Manager

Afilias is one of the major gTLD registries in existence today, having launched .info domains in 2001. Afilias has also been the registry operator for the .mobi mobile phone TLD since February, 2010.

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 Afilias was selected by ICANN to launch the .info gTLD, which is often conisdered the most successful new gTLD after the launch of .com.

The headquarters of Afilias is located in Dublin. They have a large number of offices worldwide, including operational offices in New Delhi, India, an operations center in Toronto, Canada, American offices in Philadelphia, 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.

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

Other

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.

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 translations of their own .com domain.

External links

• Afilias website
• About Afilias

Top-Level Domain