Australian Webmaster Blog

auDA, the administrators of the AU domain space have released the recommendations of a panel that was asked in 2010 to review some of the AU domain name policies.

Although it was feared that there would be a major upheaval of the policies to make them more open to foreign investment, the recommendations seem to support keeping the majority of the existing rules in place but to simply clarify a number of areas.

Below is a summary of their recommendations:

1. It will remain that only Australians can register AU domains, however clarification will be provided on the org.au and asn.au criteria requirements ensuring that there is no confusion on their use
2. auDA will release details of it’s audits to illustrate to the industry how it performs it’s audits
3. The panel recommends that the licence term should be flexible – instead of only 2 years, registrants will be able to select 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 year
4. No changes will be made to explicity discuss leasing of domains, however it will be clarified. Essentially the registrant will remain responsible for the domain in auDA’s eyes
5. The panel suggests releasing single letter domains for registration
6. The id.au space will be relaxed to allow domain names referring to personal hobbies and interests, as opposed to only allowed if referring to the person’s name
7. Direct registrations under AU not to be permitted at this time
8. The reserved name list and mispelling policies will be retained
9. The “Domain Monetisation Policy” will be abolished, instead the existing close and substantial rule will cover domain monetisation

The AU domain policies can be seen as overly strict compared to a .com however this can be a good thing for webmasters and owners of sites within the AU space. Within Australia the general public know and trust that a AU domain means it’s Australian, therefore providing that extra level of trust in dealing with the site.

Domainers investing in AU domains would have probably liked to see the rules relaxed and therefore providing them with a bigger market to trade their domains. However based on this review, auDA doesn’t appear to be allowing the AU domain space to go in that direction.

There is a fear in the Australian webmaster community that auDA will take your domain from you. The findings of the panel appear to of recognised this fear and it’s good to see that they will be clarifying some of these policies, especially the “Domain Monetisation Policy”.

The current “Domain Monetisation Policy” reads as though it only supports the use a domain parking style pages where you use Google Adsense style sdvertising to generate money from it, and not any other content. auDA most certainly needs to clarify this to reassure Australian webmasters that they are developing sites within the auDA policies.

The public have the opportunity to comment on the recommendations until Friday, 10 June 2011. You can comment either in writing or via an online survey.

For more information and to respond, visit http://www.auda.org.au/2010npp/2010npp-index/.