Domain name registrar IIS (the Internet foundation in Sweden) are all set to offload their .SE ccTLD registration business after a period of 10 years. With this move, IIS say that they will be handing over the registration responsibilities to an entity that is stable and knows the domain and hosting business inside out.
According to IIS, the domain name registration business is not lucrative for them since they do not provide other additional services such as hosting and security add-ons. They claim that IIS had taken up the responsibility of registering .SE domain names as a stop-gap so that registrants would gradually switch over to other registrars.
By making this announcement, IIS will be handling over registration duties of the .SE ccTLD to a buyer that has all the necessary skills and the expertise to run the business. They also claim that on finding a suitable entity, they will commence with the transfer of services which includes domain names, customer agreements as well as the license to use the .SE domain name for up to two years.
IIS say that .SE Direkt (their domain registration business) almost has 122,000 .SE domain names with 87,000 customers (almost 67,000 corporate and 21,000 private individual customers). They claim that at present, the domain name registrar have a total tally of 1,768,495 domain names for Sweden itself with a market share of 7%.
Since the number of customers has not since declined after IIS took over, the internet authority felt that it was the right time to no longer continue with the registrar business. Industry experts claim that this move is likely to have a positive effect on the Swedish domain and hosting industry.
It will be interesting to witness how this move affects the European hosting industry as a whole especially after Donuts got acquired by private equity firm ABRY partners to consolidate their business.