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AU Authority Moves To Censor Net Filtering Protest Site

Posted by kdawson on from the shortcutting-the-udrp dept.

An anonymous reader writes "On Friday the Sydney Morning Herald reported that an Internet censorship protest site had been set up under the banner 'Stephen Conroy: Minister for Fascism' and was ironically registered under the very name of the Australian Communications Minister responsible for trying to mandate the compulsory filtering scheme in federal law, stephenconroy.com.au. Within hours of the story being published, auDA, the Australian Domain Name Authority, had shut down the site, giving the owners only 3 hours to respond to a request to justify their eligibility for the domain. Normally auDA would allow several days to weeks for this process. An appeal to request an extension was denied, with no reason given. The site was quickly moved to a US domain, stephen-conroy.com in order to stay active while the dispute with auDA is resolved."

3 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. Re:To be fair... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    not in .com.au, it isn't. Have you seen the requirements to register a .com.au? Satire doesn't cut it, I'm afraid:

    1. To be eligible for a domain name in the com.au 2LD, registrants must be:
    a) an Australian registered company; or
    b) trading under a registered business name in any Australian State or Territory; or
    c) an Australian partnership or sole trader; or
    d) a foreign company licensed to trade in Australia; or
    e) an owner of an Australian Registered Trade Mark; or
    f) an applicant for an Australian Registered Trade Mark; or
    g) an association incorporated in any Australian State or Territory; or
    h) an Australian commercial statutory body.

    There is no

    i) in it for teh funnees.

  2. Re:As evil as it sounds... by MichaelSmith · · Score: 5, Informative

    auDA requires you have some right to the name, in this case they did, they registered the business name to go along with it. They have every right to the domain name under auDA's own policies.

    smithm@michael:~$ whois stephenconroy.com.au
    Domain Name: stephenconroy.com.au
    Last Modified:17-Dec-2009 23:01:47 UTC
    Registrar ID:Domain Central
    Registrar Name: Domain Central
    Status:pendingDelete (Client requested policy delete)

    Registrant:SAPIA PTY LTD
    Registrant ID: ABN 94140321240
    Eligibility Type: Company

    Registrant Contact ID: C032321-DC
    Registrant Contact Name: Domain Manager
    Registrant Contact Email: Visit whois.ausregistry.com.au for Web based WhoIs

    Tech Contact ID: C032321-DC
    Tech Contact Name: Domain Manager
    Tech Contact Email: Visit whois.ausregistry.com.au for Web based WhoIs

    Its not immediately clear to me how they qualified for this name.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  3. Re:As evil as it sounds... by whitehatnetizen · · Score: 5, Informative

    As much as I agree with you, you don't seem to understand that the group that registered the domain committed fraud. also in Aus, to have a .com.au domain, you need to either have a registered business/trading name related to the domain, or have the domain be your actual name. as far as I can tell, neither of these were the case and so it is fraud.