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This is how it used to be done in some countries. I remember Australian registrars refusing to register .com.au domains if you didn't have an associated ABN (Australian Business Number assigned by the tax office to registered businesses). I had a problem where outdated ABN details didn't match the entry I was trying to put in the WHOIS records. Clearing the mess took a few days.

Though today it looks like click and play just like .com domains.

It's still supposed to be the case (I'm a registered domain registrar) - but it is rarely enforced, despite my continual arguments (please don't guess who I am, it should be pretty obvious but... I use a pseudonym for a reason).

MelbourneIT, GoHosting, and VentraIP are the worst offenders by numbers. The last two are the biggest scumbags (front-running and domain hijacking). GoHosting have spent years stalling on DNSSEC and avoiding penalties for flagrant breaching of policies. In fairness the fish rots from the head down and ICAAN started the shower of shit.

By law we are still required to verify an ABN and a contact address - likewise publication of the Registrant's Rights and Responsibilities (a quick Google will show you how many are compliant - likewise registration of resellers).

I'm sorry to hear about the ATO stalling on your ABN - the ATO's outsourcing of their systems is a whole 'nuther barrel of rotten fish. But thanks for saying that anyway - the problems won't go away if people don't complain.

This is how it used to be done in some countries. I remember Australian registrars refusing to register .com.au domains if you didn't have an associated ABN (Australian Business Number assigned by the tax office to registered businesses). I had a problem where outdated ABN details didn't match the entry I was trying to put in the WHOIS records. Clearing the mess took a few days.

Though today it looks like click and play just like .com domains.

It's still supposed to be the case (I'm a registered domain registrar) - but it is rarely enforced, despite my continual arguments (please don't guess who I am, it should be pretty obvious but... I use a pseudonym for a reason).

MelbourneIT, GoHosting, and VentraIP are the worst offenders by numbers. The last two are the biggest scumbags (front-running and domain hijacking). GoHosting have spent years stalling on DNSSEC and avoiding penalties for flagrant breaching of policies. In fairness the fish rots from the head down and ICAAN started the shower of shit.

By law we are still required to verify an ABN and a contact address - likewise publication of the Registrant's Rights and Responsibilities (a quick Google will show you how many are compliant - likewise registration of resellers).

I'm sorry to hear about the ATO stalling on your ABN - the ATO's outsourcing of their systems is a whole 'nuther barrel of rotten fish. But thanks for saying that anyway - the problems won't go away if people don't complain.

http://www.auda.org.au/policies/auda-2008-05/ The AuDA isn't politically motivated, just covering their arse. http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/auDA-No-govt-request-to-kill-Conroy-site/0,130061791,339300152,00.htm

There was a time when I would of agreed with the parent. At that time I regarded Senator Alston as the worlds greatest luddite, too. But in retrospect, it doesn't stand up to analysis.

When the government wanted to regulate the Internet, they have been very effective. The anti-spam act was, after a few prosecutions 100% successful. They hounded wayward DNS registrars into obligation, and similarly with phishing web sites. What drove the point home for me was the internet gambling laws. Can you imagine a better way to keep gambling money in Australia than this?

Yes they appear to have done things that, if you accept their stated aims, were odd. For example, the web page classification system they put in place could never of worked. (For the non-Aussies out their, the law was/is that potentially offensive web pages had to get a classification from the same body that classified films. The cost per page was the same as getting an entire film classified - approx $3000.) Now either the government was totally brain dead, or it was deliberately designed to not work. Why design something that would not work at all? Well it is effectively that same as not doing it, as far as the internet users are concerned. After the dust settled the observed effect was 0. If the observed effect is 0, then by election time no one is going to remember it anyway. Certainly it isn't going to effect their vote. So why do in the first place? Well it wasn't for the reasons they said, obviously. But I do recall they needed Senator Harradine's vote on GST. Harradine was to say the least a highly religious man. For example, he opposed family planning on religious grounds.

Ditto for family porn filters. How to you appease the moral minority on porn, while not actually interfering with any voting persons daily dose? Since people who want to view porn make up roughly the half voting population, this is quite a dilemma. How about making it mandatory for ISP's to provide porn filters for free? Absolutely no one is inconvenienced by this - not the ISP's, not the users - no one, simply because no one takes up the offer. Yet it was championed as mandatory porn filtering.

Far from being brain dead, as far as I can tell Howard's government is ruthlessly efficient when it comes to controlling the internet. They know what works, and they know to finesse a sop when required. When they really want to take down a web page, they do it, law or no law. Love it or hate it, these are not the actions of people who don't understand the internet.

So what are they doing now? As a famous politician who once ran sunny Queensland said, they are feeding the chooks. I was always wondered where that came from. After reading the posts here it suddenly hit me. After feeding, it appears the said chooks run around like, well, chooks with their heads cut off. The resulting commotion makes a great smoke screen. The government can get along with the real job at hand in peace and quiet. In retrospect when you look at the children overboard affair and other things, it appear the Howard government has honed this technique into a fine art.

There was a time when I would of agreed with the parent. At that time I regarded Senator Alston as the worlds greatest luddite, too. But in retrospect, it doesn't stand up to analysis.

When the government wanted to regulate the Internet, they have been very effective. The anti-spam act was, after a few prosecutions 100% successful. They hounded wayward DNS registrars into obligation, and similarly with phishing web sites. What drove the point home for me was the internet gambling laws. Can you imagine a better way to keep gambling money in Australia than this?

Yes they appear to have done things that, if you accept their stated aims, were odd. For example, the web page classification system they put in place could never of worked. (For the non-Aussies out their, the law was/is that potentially offensive web pages had to get a classification from the same body that classified films. The cost per page was the same as getting an entire film classified - approx $3000.) Now either the government was totally brain dead, or it was deliberately designed to not work. Why design something that would not work at all? Well it is effectively that same as not doing it, as far as the internet users are concerned. After the dust settled the observed effect was 0. If the observed effect is 0, then by election time no one is going to remember it anyway. Certainly it isn't going to effect their vote. So why do in the first place? Well it wasn't for the reasons they said, obviously. But I do recall they needed Senator Harradine's vote on GST. Harradine was to say the least a highly religious man. For example, he opposed family planning on religious grounds.

Ditto for family porn filters. How to you appease the moral minority on porn, while not actually interfering with any voting persons daily dose? Since people who want to view porn make up roughly the half voting population, this is quite a dilemma. How about making it mandatory for ISP's to provide porn filters for free? Absolutely no one is inconvenienced by this - not the ISP's, not the users - no one, simply because no one takes up the offer. Yet it was championed as mandatory porn filtering.

Far from being brain dead, as far as I can tell Howard's government is ruthlessly efficient when it comes to controlling the internet. They know what works, and they know to finesse a sop when required. When they really want to take down a web page, they do it, law or no law. Love it or hate it, these are not the actions of people who don't understand the internet.

So what are they doing now? As a famous politician who once ran sunny Queensland said, they are feeding the chooks. I was always wondered where that came from. After reading the posts here it suddenly hit me. After feeding, it appears the said chooks run around like, well, chooks with their heads cut off. The resulting commotion makes a great smoke screen. The government can get along with the real job at hand in peace and quiet. In retrospect when you look at the children overboard affair and other things, it appear the Howard government has honed this technique into a fine art.

IPv4 address scarcity isn't artificial; it's a real issue. IPv6 will resolve it ... if anybody can ever be convinced to deploy it. I support IPv6 on my home network and the network at work, and the only IPv6 communication I do is between the two sites. Nothing else I ever encounter supports it, either via 6to4 or native IPv6.

Domain name scarcity isn't artificial either. There are an essentially infinite number of domains, but they vary in desirability, and each individual domain name is unique. Domain names are not a uniform good, and are not perfectly subsitutable. I don't know about you, but my employer (the POST Newspapers, Western Australia) wouldn't particularly want http://aik0mahhievaijeisiephootequahveiraigiemeebi xietiemeeriehohhahngukashaisaathiedoorelahsukujehe shu.com.au/, though it is in fact a legal and valid domain name.

I agree that there are certainly problems with how domain names are managed, especially for the .com, .net, and .org TLDs. In these TLDs squatting and speculation is a real problem, but that's not because of artificial value. The value of a domain is very real. That doesn't, however, mean that domains must be treated as property, and it's from there that many of the issues stem.

Consider the .au TLD space. In the .au space, if you register a .com name, you should do so with a legitimate claim to the name according to the AuDA rules. If you register a name to squat (speculating, asking money from the company whose registered business name matches the domain, using the name to badmouth them, etc), the domain will simply be removed from you and handed over. You can't buy the domain, only usage rights to it. Similarly, the .org space is limited to registered charities, non-profit organizations, and so on. The .au space is well managed and suffers few or none of the problems afflicing .com, .net, and .org . This is in no small part because in .au domains are not property that you can own.

I see little hope of change in the .com, .net, and .org space. I'm personally hoping they'll just quietly die off in favour of ccTLD subdomains, but if anything the opposite appears to be happening. Too many people only understand ".com". This makes the scarcity problem worse, and does so in the very space with the worst problems. Still, what's to be done - resume the domains already "sold"?

This matches my experience with them. They seem to go out of their way to be uncontactable and unhelpful. Even something as straightforward as changing the designated administrative or technical contact for a given domain is a nuisance, requiring multiple faxes on company letterheads to be sent, signatures from all concerned parties, and all sorts of other hurdles designed to make the process as intimidating and daunting as possible. I believe they also hiked up renewal and registration charges mid-2003 by some extravagant amount, making them more expensive than essentially any other local registrar and in exchange for an arguably inferior service.

Fortunately, there are many other Australian registrar choices now that the DNS business has been revamped and restructured under auDA. As MelbourneIT becomes more irrelevant and unused with each passing day I look forward with great anticipation to toasting their eventual demise.

This matches my experience with them. They seem to go out of their way to be uncontactable and unhelpful. Even something as straightforward as changing the designated administrative or technical contact for a given domain is a nuisance, requiring multiple faxes on company letterheads to be sent, signatures from all concerned parties, and all sorts of other hurdles designed to make the process as intimidating and daunting as possible. I believe they also hiked up renewal and registration charges mid-2003 by some extravagant amount, making them more expensive than essentially any other local registrar and in exchange for an arguably inferior service.

Fortunately, there are many other Australian registrar choices now that the DNS business has been revamped and restructured under auDA. As MelbourneIT becomes more irrelevant and unused with each passing day I look forward with great anticipation to toasting their eventual demise.

Chesley Rafferty, is that you?? DNA mail out fraud

Sadly no longer true: AU domain policies

The registering organisation must be a company, within a *very* loose definition - for example owning a registered trade mark qualifies you. The domain name must then either be derived from your organisation name (in a couple of obvious ways) *OR*:

c) be otherwise closely and substantially connected to the registrant, because the domain name refers to.
(i) a product that the registrant manufactures or sells; or
(ii) a service that the registrant provides; or
(iii) an event that the registrant organises or sponsors; or
(iv) an activity that the registrant facilitates, teaches or trains; or
(v) a venue that the registrant operates; or
(vi) a profession that the registrant's employees practise.

The rules were loosened about a year and a half ago, at about the same time as auDA took over management of the .AU domain.

Originally the requirement for org.au was that the domain not fit any of the other categories. The new (auDA) requirement is that the organisation be a charity or non-profit organisation.

Not sure what you're referring to regarding .com.au domains. As far as I know we've never had wildcards. Further more, there are strict conditions that have to be meet in order to register a .com.au domain. They have been slightly relaxed from the 1st of July this year, however they are still rather strict (and so they should be IMHO.) See schedule C in the AUDA policy document if you're interested in the gory details.

The .AU domain space was under the custodianship of one person (I think has name is Robert Elz from memory) who had passed on the responsibility of actually running it to the University of Melbourne years ago. So your claim is only half right.

In time, the University of Melbourne spun off a corporation called Melbourne IT to fulfil the same role. The public float was/is shrouded in controversy over early and exclusive options to buy stock going to UMelb directors. By early 2001 (I think) Robert Elz had ceded control (somewhat begrudgingly I believe) to an independent body called AUDA who are an open and seemingly accountable non-profit non-government body. There was a tender put out to run the .AU registry by AUDA and by mid 2001 (or was it 2002?) the new registry AUSREGISTRY was operational and the .AU domain space was deregulated, halving prices literally overnight for domain names.

Things have been going swimmingly since then. In fact, they have been going a lot better than before, and despite changing both the body responsible for the .AU domain and the registry, from the users perspective the whole system never missed a beat.

Disclaimer: I believe the order of events is correct in the above but the dates may be wrong, sorry about that.

Nothing to do with them. Unfortunately Australia "pioneered" this kind of dodgy operation and the Australian ones came before the DRo* started.

The .au Regulator, auDA, has issued a number of consumer alerts about them. For example, NetRegister is another company run by the same person as IRA.

Well, that went out the window rather quickly. Network Solutions decided in the interest of being able to sell more domains, they'd let anybody whose credit card clears own a .com, .net, or .org domain without checking to see if they really qualify for the definition of those TLDs. As a result, the TLDs lost their meaning.

That's only because Network Solutions made that decision based on their commercial interests, and because they were free to make the decision - in .au, the distinction between .com.au, .net.au and .org.au (and, for that matter, .asn.au and .id.au) is very strictly enforced. This also has the effect of pretty much preventing naming rights conflicts, since you need to prove your claim to the domain name before you are allowed to register it.

On the other hand, it makes it pretty bloody impossible for an individual to register anything but "my-full-name.id.au" in the .au ccTLD...

The official policies are at http://www.auda.org.au/policy/

Asking for .org.au domains has seemed like a bit of a lucky dip with Elz, and my experience agrees with earlier comments that sometimes he's prompt (2 weeks), and sometimes your request goes into a black hole.

But anyone in a real hurry could get .org or .asn.au or something if they had the cash.

Robert Elz handled .org.au for free for all these years, and many non-profits were able to get their own domain name without the cost and hassle of startup and annual fees.

Thanks Mr. Elz!

No, Melbourne IT was granted a 5 year license in 1996 to run the registrar services. It is currently controlled by auDA, previously by Robert Elz. You can see the delegation of authority for .au on page 7
of the .au technical report.

I'd suggest you read IANA's report which is a lot more comprehensive than the media reports.

The news article says it is a private-sector body, but it is an open body formed of stakeholders including domain registrars, users, and Internet organisations (e.g. the Internet Society and Electronic Frontiers are on the board).

I am on the board of auDA, elected as a user representative. I am not from a registrar or any commercial interest. I can say that everyone has the best interests of .au at heart and I think this is a very positive move.

auDA's plans for .au are already available on the Internet and were formed through open public processes earlier in the year. The primary result will be competition in the domain registration area. Currently the domains under .au (com.au, net.au) etc are run by parallel monopolies, but this will be opened up to a competitive environment under the plan. The competition report is here.

To register sld.com, sld must be a form of your company name or a trademarked product name.

This is how the .AU domain space is controlled. You can't get a .com.au unless you have a company with that name (or a derivative of it :). You can't get a .org.au unless you're a non-profit organisation.

Quite handy for limiting cybersquatting, etc (note: it doesn't get rid of it, not by a long shot :) However, it does present problems. The people arranging the New Bruce Sports Stadium in Canberra (capital of Australia) had to get newbruce.com because they didn't have a company name like "New Bruce", etc.

As with anything, it has its good points and its bad points. Check out the .au Domain Administration pages for information about the group that's hoping to take over control of the AU domain.