Just as a follow up to Larry Bloch's message.

There may be some misconceptions about Melbourne IT's involvement in this
tender, especially with the statement in the Netregistry press release.  (ie
"NetRegistry wins contract against fierce competition, including Melbourne
IT").

Like NetRegistry, Melbourne IT also offered to host AUNIC for no charge in
response to the RFT tender.  The tender was released in May 2000, and the
AUNIC was migrated over to NetRegistry on 3 June 2001.  As auDA took a long
time to respond to the original tender respondents, Melbourne IT eventually
WITHDREW its offer due to the heavy load on production and development staff
in our growing international operations.  I don't know who else may have
responded to the auDA tender.

Note also that Melbourne IT provided considerable assistance at no charge
during the migration of AUNIC from Telstra to NetRegistry, especially with
regard to testing and debugging the usual problems that result from such a
move.  I understand that other registrars (e.g Robert Elz) gave advice to
auDA during the migration.  Cybersource (David Keegel and Con Zymaris) also
put a substantial effort (beyond the call of duty) into the migration.

So I would like to publicly thank all those how assisted in moving AUNIC to
its new location, and acknowledge the generosity of NetRegistry in providing
the hosting for AUNIC.

I hope others will recognise that it was a true industry cooperative effort
to improve the service levels of AUNIC, and not the result of any one
organisation.

Regards,
Bruce Tonkin
Chief Technology Officer
Melbourne IT