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Telecommunications Lawyer hoses down .au domain 'gold rush' claims
Telecommunications Lawyer hoses down .au domain 'gold rush' claims | Lawyer hoses down .au domain 'gold rush' claims |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Monday, 02 June 2008 | |
      
Lissi Mack-de-Boer, VP sales at Sedo, said: "We expect to see a real gold rush in the coming weeks and months...The world will never run out of domain names but high quality top-level domains still represent the most high value investment opportunities. The relaxing of regulation in Australia now opens up a market with a very rich secondary domain name market. For the English-speaking world in particular the opportunity to buy or register Australian domain names will be a crucial addition to businesses' brand strategies as well individual and institutional investors' portfolios." However in a news update published on its website in March, law firm Deacons was sceptical that the new regime would have any significant impact, noting that trading was quite possible under the previous regime. Senior associate Michael Park said: "The current policy prohibits the transfer of .au domain names except in limited circumstances, which include transfer in the course of sale of business, transfer to related entities or transfer as part of settlement of a dispute...However, even under the current policy, it is still practically possible to sell a domain name by structuring the sale to fall within one of the limited circumstances under the policy. The relaxation of the current policy is therefore unlikely to have any significant impact other than to streamline the transfer process and enable domain name registrants and prospective registrants to make informed decisions in relation to the value of their domain names. Deacons says the key features of the new policy are: - a person will not be able to register a .au domain name for the sole purpose of resale; - a holding period of six months for newly registered domain names will apply; - after the six months holding period, a registrant may offer its domain name for sale or transfer by any means (including listing the domain name on brokerage sites, advertising or contacting a prospective buyer); - the transfer will be processed by a standard transfer form; and - the parties to the transfer will be asked to disclose the sale method and price on a voluntary and confidential basis to auDA for the purposes of collecting statistics. Among those areas Sedo expects to see the greatest clamour for domains are: entertainment; finance; gambling; real estate; sport and travel and tourism. Sedo says its best-selling domains to date have included Vodka.com which sold for $US3m, showing the value of generic top-level domains for popular products and services. It claims to already have 10,000 registered users in Australia trading domains. |
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