It’s going to be the largest ever migration of a single TLD between back-end registry service providers, but it was announced without fanfare late last week.
On page four of Tucows CEO Elliot Noss’s prepared fourth-quarter remarks to analysts last week, he revealed the company has beaten GoDaddy to take over the contract to run India’s .in ccTLD:
Tucows Domains was recently selected to be the technical services provider for the .IN country code domain, operated by the National Internet Exchange of India. Our teams are closely collaborating and we are establishing a dedicated team in India to support this initiative
Noss said that the migration involves “approximately 4 million domains” and will take place “later this year”.
While NIXI does not publish its registration numbers, Verisign’s Domain Name industry Brief put .in at 4.1 million names at the end of 2024.
Even accounting for upwards rounding by Noss, 4 million names would make the migration the largest in the history of the DNS.
The current record was set in 2018, when Afilias (now Identity Digital) took over Australia’s .au from Neustar (now GoDaddy. There were 3.1 million names in .au at that time.
When Neustar/GoDaddy took over .in from Afilias/Identity Digital in 2019, it was reportedly because it had bid $0.70 per domain, undercutting the incumbent’s offer of $1.10
But, while the deal is surely worth many millions (maybe $10 million over five years if we guess at a $0.50 bid) to Tucows’ top line, it may not be especially profitable.
Noss said in his remarks to analysts: “The pricing and margin contribution for this piece of business is typical of a large, high volume customer.”
But a demonstrable track record of handling large migrations often comes up in registry RFPs, so the .in deal puts Tucows in a strong position in future contract opportunities.
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