Today Guinness World Records awarded a new world record for GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS title for the Largest Migration of an Internet Top-Level Domain in a Single Transition, for the transition of the .au domain by auDA and Afilias.
The award was presented by GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS Adjudicator Hannah Ortman, and accepted by Ram Mohan from Afilias and Cameron Boardman on behalf of auDA. The award recognises the successful transition of 3,153,979 .au domain names on Sunday, July 1, 2018.
The transition comes after the commencement of the Registry Transformation Project initiated by auDA in 2017, which was successfully concluded at the end of 2017 with a large number of bidders from around the globe. The Registry Transformation project brought with it a number of benefits for the Australian internet community including a $12 million marketing fund to support registrars and resellers sell .au domain names.
“It may not sound sexy, but the award is a significant achievement”, auDA CEO, Cameron Boardman said.
Boardman also said “The .au namespace is so ubiquitous that people take it for granted, but the migration from our previous registry operator to Afilias Australia could have had serious consequences for the economy, but it went seamlessly.
The planning, preparation, testing and execution were the auDA equivalent of preparing for Y2K. And as with Y2K when people awoke on July 1, 2018 they didn’t notice a thing. If the internet broke because of the transfer, the digital economy, of which the .au namespace is the backbone, could have ground to a halt.”
The Victorian Minister for Innovation and the Digital Economy, Philip Dalidakis, said the migration was a wonderful technological achievement and shows that Melbourne is a tech hub in the Asia Pacific region.
“This transition highlights the great technical capability we have here in Melbourne and I congratulate auDA and Afilias Australia on this great achievement which will ensure the smooth functioning of the millions of websites that underpin the Australian economy.”
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