I just had a read of the changes that the Australian governing authority (AUDA) is looking to introduce to the .AU namespace. I must admit that I found myself quite perplexed that they have no idea what is going on in the domain space.

The single biggest problem with AUDA is they are the police, judge, jury and executioner of the .AU namespace. What do I mean by this?

AUDA actively trawls the .AU namespace looking for domains that may fall foul of one of their policies. When they find one, they demand the registrant justify why they should keep the domain and if AUDA is not satisfied with the response they turn the domain off.

Let me share with you my experience with this process. A number of years ago I used to own around 2,000 .AU domains, I dropped the lot of them and would now encourage anyone that owns a .au domain to do the same.

Even though I owned generic domains (ie. no TM violations) AUDA in their infinite wisdom decided to take a domain off me because they had researched the fact that a New Zealand company with a similar name to my domain may want to come to Australia. Completely ridiculous.

The fact that the New Zealand company didn’t exist prior to me registering the domain is beside the point. After complaining (and the domain turned off) AUDA then threatened to investigate each and every one of my .AU domains by using Google (a dynamic search engine) as the arbitrator of whether I could keep my domains. Like I said, I dropped the lot and invested my money in other namespaces where I had security over my assets.