This is the third of four installments of Radio World’s special series about the four different companies vying for control over the dot-radio top level domain (TLD).

When we asked Afilias for details on their application for dot-radio earlier this summer, a company rep wrote in an email that they are “not discussing specifics of any domains for which we have applied.”

He added, “We’ve still got many months to see which application for (dot-radio) will pass ICANN’s screening process as well as figuring out which one will eventually be awarded the domain.”

What Radio World can share about this company is a bit of background information—both using what the company has provided and what has been written about them in business media.

While headquartered in Dublin, Afilias has office branches all over the world: London, Toronto, Philadelphia and New Delhi. They launched their registry services in July 2001, with the management of the TLD, dot-info. They now also operate dot-mobi and dot-pro and they “provide registry services” for dot-org, dot-aero, dot-asia and several others.

They “support” 20 million domain names. In July, Forbes called Afilias “the world’s leading provider of Internet infrastructure solutions that connect people to their data.” 

In a Wall Street Journal article in August, Afilias executive vice president and chief marketing officer Roland LaPlante was quoted as saying that banks would get a “big leg up” from having new addresses with a specific domain.

“If someone goes to a dot-USB site, you know you’re getting your account on UBS,” he said in the article.

Afilias has submitted approximately 30 applications to ICANN for itself, and hundreds more on behalf of their clients, making the total number of applications they’re handling 305. ICANN has reportedly received a total of 1,930 applications for new TLDs.