Web policeman casts net for .au cheats

October 8th, 2002
By Nicole Lindsay

Some applications for Australia's new generic names could be ruled invalid after last week's rush to buy a stake in the internet.

Nearly 3,000 previously banned generic domain names were sold by the Australian domain name authority (auDA) for more than

$2.6 million and only 10 names remain.

But the chief executive of auDA, Chris Disspain, said some applications for the names would be investigated to check their new owners were entitled to the business names.

Australian .com.au holders must demonstrate a close connection with the name they buy, and there is no secondary domain name market in Australia where valuable names can be sold at a premium.

Two Australian names are for sale on ebay - hozpitality.com.au for $100,000 and 666.com.au for $50,000. But Mr Disspain said the sellers of those names would not be able to transfer them to the new owners.

The auction, which finished last week, netted auDA more than $2.6million.

The authority opened up the Australian domain name space to registrar competition on July 1 after the international body, ICANN, controversially redelegated the .au administration from Melbourne University lecturer Robert Elz to auDA.

Whereas Melbourne IT was once the only registrar of the lucrative .com.au name, there are now more than 10 registrars.

The number of Australian domain names grew by just over 10 per cent in the first three months of the new regulatory system.

Provisional figures from AusRegistry, the company that runs the registry (or database) of nearly all Australian domain names, show that there were 277,920 Australian domain names in September.

The name space was sitting at about 250,000 on July 1 this year when AusRegistry took over the four-year contract to run the .au registry .

Since August, the net number of names grew by 5,870, with 9,212 of them brand new registrations - meaning that about 3,342 have either been deleted or will be deleted in the next month.

AusRegistry director Adrian Kinderis said: "The domain name space is continuing to grow but it's stable."

"The impact of id.au [a new domain name] is yet to be significant but we are about to kick off a new marketing campaign to raise its profile," Mr Kinderis said.

Melbourne IT is still acknowledged to control the lion's share of the names, due to its previous status as the sole registrar of Australian .au names.

The four top-ranking registrars are understood to be Melbourne IT with Sydney-based companies, TPP Internet, Enetica and NetRegistry following close behind.

In recent months, auDA has drawn some fire from the internet community for not publishing key information on its activities and the performance of the registrars.

The authority was created in 1999 to run the Australian domain name system and boasts former Fraser communications minister and former Liberal Party president, Tony Staley, on the board.

Mr Disspain was selected to head the organisation in October 2000 after a stint as chairman of Bambuu, the Perth mining company that became a dot com.