auDA seeks public comment

Stephen Withers
Monday, 29 November 2010 09:55

IT Policy - Regulation

If you want to have your say about some of the policies governing the .au namespace, auDA is especially open to your comments until January.

auDA, the body that administers the .au namespace has invited public comment on the policies governing domain names.

The 2010 Names Policy Panel was appointed by the auDA board in August. The panel has now released a discussion paper, and members of the public are invited to comment the issues raised.

Specific questions raised by the paper include "Should the restriction on registrants being Australian (or registered to trade in Australia) remain in place?", "Should the fixed 2 year domain name licence period be changed?" and "Should .au be opened up to direct registrations?"

That third issue reflects ICANN's preparation to allow any entity with sufficiently deep pockets to have its own top-level domain.

The current second-level domains within .au are asn.au, com.au, csiro.au, edu.au, id.au, gov.au, net.au, org.au, and the community and geographically based act.au, qld.au, nsw.au, nt.au, sa.au, tas.au, vic.au and wa.au. If direct registrations were allowed, we could see domains such as qantas.au or telstra.au.

The discussion paper is available here [PDF] and instructions for making submissions are here.

The closing date for submissions is January 21, 2011.