Changes To The .AU Namespace Under Afilias

The registration and renewal of .au domain names are now governed by Afilias Australia starting 1 July.

Via an official statement on Sunday, .au Domain Administration (auDA) confirmed that the transition process from AusRegistry to Afilias was successfully completed. About 3.1 million domain names are migrated to a new registry and national domain name infrastructure.

With the .au namespace 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.

Created in 1986, .au is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Australia and is being managed by auDA. The organization announced the change-over project in December 2017, replacing AusRegistry as .au registry operator after more than 15 years.

Why choose Afilias?

Afilias is globally known for its top level domain (TLD) registry and DNS technology.

Apart from its competitive pricing and great reputation as a registry operator, Afilias was selected based on non-financial criteria. These include the ability to perform to the technical specification, its potential to meet or surpass auDA’s required service levels, capacity to support the registry transformation project goals, and its security and risk management capabilities.

auDa asserted that the move to Afilias’ advanced registry will enhance .au namespace’s global reputation for reliability and security.

What changes are being imposed?

To be clear, your website is not affected by the changes nor your domain name(s). But, now that Afilias is the new .au namespace manager, there are a few tweaks in the registration and renewal process:

• All Australian ccTLDs (including .com.au, net.au, org.au, id.au, asn.au, edu.au and gov.au) are now managed by Afilias.
• Domain names that end in .au can now be registered or renewed for 1 to 5 years. Your choice.
• For .au domain names due for deletion, there will be a 14-day grace period.
• The expiry date of your active domain names remains the same (at the time it was registered). However, you can now extend the expiration date of up to 5 years.

For Network Dynamics customers that need to renew their domains, simply go to your client area and select the term you want to register your domain for.