Afilias
 | |
| Type: | Private |
| Industry: | Registry, Registrar |
| Founded: | 2000 |
| Headquarters: | 2 La Touche House IFSC Dublin 1 |
| Country: | Ireland |
| Employees: | 150 [1] |
| Website: | Afilias.info |
| Twitter: |  @Afilias
|
| Key People | |
| Hal Lubsen, CEO Ram Mohan, EVP and CTO | |
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.[2]
History[edit | edit source]
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.[3]
Afilias is the second largest domain services provider after Verisign, supporting over 14 million domain names, as of January 2008.[4]
Products and services[edit | edit source]
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[edit | edit source]
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.[5]
Interesting facts about Afilias[edit | edit source]
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.[6]
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.[7] 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).[8] It has continued to transition to DNSSEC secured TLDs.