Domainer

It's all about domain names

Domain Market Is Back

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australian domain name salesIt is now safe to say that the strength of the Australian domain name market is back. Public confidence in the value of premium Australian domain names seems to now be happening again, ever since the auDA SGM was completed nearly two weeks ago.

Most notably, David and Anthony’s Drop.com.au platform is seeing end-users paying huge dollars to secure their dream domain name for themselves. Combining the power and platform strategy of Domain Shield and Drop seems to have been a genius business move by the veteran domain name businessmen.

Netfleet have had to redesign their entire system since the July 1st domain migration.  They weren’t catching many names during July, but seem to be making a slow comeback this week.

What these huge recent sales prove is that the drop aftermarket system is working. End-users who are pro-active in protecting their brand by buying premium generic domain names for themselves can easily do so.

Here is a list of public sales for 2018 so far:

  • Broker.com.au – Drop – $100,000
  • CPA.com.au – Drop – $50,000
  • Advice.com.au – Netfleet – $28,710
  • (Two Letter).com.au – DBR – $26,400 (waiting permission to publish)
  • LifeBlood.com.au – DBR – $24,200
  • Brokers.com.au – Drop – $10,000
  • ******Link.com.au – DBR – $6,600 (waiting permission to publish)

Please let us know in the comments below, any sales you’re allowed to disclose. I’m aware of a number of five-figure sales by some well-known domain name investors, but don’t have permission to publish. Would be good to see some sales figures quoted below, if you’re allowed… Feel free to hide half the domain name if you need to…

 

Domainer Show – Episode 3

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Watch Episode 3 by clicking play above.

Listen to Episode 3 in your car or headphones by clicking play below.

 

In this week’s episode, Rob and Ed talk with Anthony from the daily-drop platform Drop.com.au(.)

Topics discussed include:

  • the Australian domain name migration, one-month in.
  • The new Drop.com.au platform, that now strongly rivals Netfleet!
  • The biggest dropped name caught so far this year for $50,000!
  • Netfleet “Back Orders”.
  • An update on Afilias making AUTH CODE recovery faster, since our last video stating two days was too long.
  • Plus, constructive criticism on how to make the Drop.com.au platform better!

 

University.com.au Hand-Registration

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university.com.au

Last night, a very lucky individual hand-registered University.com.au over at Crazy Domains.

It’s a very generic domain name. As generic as you can get.

The only small, tiny problem is…

It appears on auDA’s Reserved List Policy, alongside the following list of names:

Commonwealth
Banking
Federal
Building Society
Credit Union

I informed the new owner of this, but noted that it was VERY generic and that almost EVERY OTHER WORD or PHRASE listed under the RESTRICTED UNDER LEGISLATION section of the Reserved List Policy has been being used as a private domain name for decades by general businesses or companies.

This implies that auDA have always allowed this to happen, and will probably continue to do so.

For example:

Commonwealth.com.au is a private fancy golf-course-type club.

Federal.com.au points to a private website.

CreditUnion.com.au is owned by CustomerOwnedBanking.asn.au

And, maybe most importantly…

Banking.com.au is owned by a private company called INGDirect.com.au and protected by Corporation Service Company Pty Ltd.

My point in all of this simply goes as follows…

If auDA attempt to use this outdated, and clearly non-governed policy to remove University.com.au from the new owner, they will also be forced to admit they have not bothered enforcing this policy for decades, and will also have to remove all of the above domain names from all of these other domain name holders as well, including INGDirect.

So,

Congratulations to the new owner of University.com.au !!!!

You lucky bugger!

…

One has to consider how this all happened though?

Did this domain name DROP yesterday, due to the current Afilias migration?

And if it did, what about this section of the Reserved List Policy that states:

1.2 The Reserved List is held in the registry database. Each application for a domain name is checked against the Reserved List and domain names that exactly match a name on the Reserved List are blocked from registration.

Afilias have let this domain name through, so it must have been absolutely fine to register?

They didn’t BLOCK the domain name from registration…

Apparently there’s still gold nuggets laying on the surface of some sections of land, if you just bother to look!

.au Registry Migration Aftermath

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.au migration afilias

The first day seeing Afilias as the new .AU Registry Operator is here.

We are LIVE.

Afilias has released the following statement, most notably stating:

The new system for .au went live on Sunday, July 1, 2018, ahead of schedule and as planned. The transition involved moving the records of over 3.1M domains from the legacy system to the new system within just a few hours.

First, the legacy provider closed the registry to new transactions on Saturday morning. Then the full registry dataset was extracted, encrypted, and sent to auDA, who sent it to Afilias Australia. Afilias verified the integrity of the data, transformed it into standards-based formats, loaded it into our new, dedicated Australian systems, and conducted a comprehensive set of tests to ensure a clean system.

The new registry opened for registrars early on the morning of July 1.

And auDA have been very quick to declare that everything has happened extremely smoothly, releasing their own statement on the auDA website, plus a seperate email statement (different from the website blog) that reads as follows:

The .au name space was transformed overnight with the seamless transmission of 3.1 million domain names to a new registry and national domain name infrastructure.

.au Domain Administration Ltd CEO, Cameron Boardman, said the transition of the registry to Afilias Australia was a milestone in the development of Australia’s digital economy.

The transition was completed on Sunday July 1, 2018, after six months of exhaustive planning and testing by auDA and Afilias working with the registrars who provide .au names to the public.

This followed a comprehensive expression of interest and tender conducted in 2017 to identify the registry operator of the .au namespace for the next 4 years from 1 July, 2018.

With the .au name space being an essential piece of national digital infrastructure, the new registry operator will help ensure the operational stability, security and integrity of the internet in Australia.

For .au users the new infrastructure will see a national network of DNS nodes across the country which will see faster response times, increased resilience and increased security.

As part of the new registry and tender process:

  • .com.au, net.au, org.au, id.au, asn.au, edu.au, and gov.au names will be able to be registered for between one and five years;
  • A new $12 million marketing and innovation program over 4 years to increase the awareness and use of .au; and,
  • A 10 percent reduction in wholesale fees for .au names.

“The .au name space is essential national infrastructure. It forms the backbone of the digital economy”, Mr Boardman said.

“The new registry will strengthen the operation and security of the .au name space so users can have confidence in the integrity and availability of .au domains.”

The adoption and use of digital technologies could contribute between $140 billion and $250 billion to Australia’s GDP by 2025, according to a September 2017 federal government report.

“The .au name space will play an integral part in this growth.”

“auDA is now positioned to help spur this economic growth with a network and registry provided by Afilias that will give the support continued expansion of the digital economy.”

There’s no doubt that auDA have put a lot of time and effort into this transition. And at first-look, Afilias certainly haven’t made any major blunders…

Over the coming week, I’m sure we will all come to the conclusion that this was a genius move by auDA, choosing an alternate company to handle the .AU Domain Name system, after AusRegistry performed a great service for 26 years… or, perhaps it was a bad move?

The next week will tell all.

Until we know for sure, some users are noting the WHOIS service is not currently working, and neither are expiry dates.

Plus, we still don’t know when and where the daily .AU domain name dropping service is going to be working and fully functional? Some people are claiming July 15th?

Afilias’ Official Domain Name Drop List doesn’t currently work…

I’m sure if domainers are experiencing problems, they’ll voice their opinions below.

Australian Domain Registry Migration is here

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afilias .au migration

There’s two days to go until the world’s biggest ever domain name migration, as we recently discussed here.

It’s time to put on your helmets and stock the bunker!

On June 3o, Afilias are going to migrate 3.1 million Australian domain names from AusRegistry, over to their own data centre servers and cloud systems.

This past Saturday, exactly one week before the huge migration, Afilias officially stated on their blog:

Transition Weekend Coming Soon!

We’re ready to go!

We’ve undertaken extensive testing, and everything is ticking along nicely. We provide lots of detail to registrars about what’s being undertaken as we orchestrate this historic transition – or, as we put it, our Sydney Opera House production – in a recent blog.

We’ve gathered contact details from all registrars so we can keep them all up-to-date on each milestone during transition weekend and reach them when it’s time to lift the curtain and go live!

Importantly, and this isn’t just reserved for transition weekend, we have technical support available 24/7/365. Yep, they’re there in the unlikely event that you’ll need them. Our Melbourne-based team will check in with registrars once we go live. They can’t wait to make that call!

I guess we’ll all be happy campers come Monday morning… or not…

Once complete, it will be the first time in 30 years that Australians residents can renew domain names for 1 year, or 5 years!

Domainer wishes Afilias, auDA, Netfleet, Drop.com.au and all the Registrars the best of luck over this important weekend for Australian domain names.

I’m sure the entire industry is aware there could be a week or two after this weekend, when teething problems have to be ironed out.

In the meantime, if you haven’t renewed your domain names that are expiring over the next few weeks, I suggest you DO THAT TODAY. Who knows if everything is going to work properly next week?

That goes for DNS changes too. Make those changes today, if you need them changed.

 

LATEST NEWS ON DROP CATCHING

I spoke with Nikki from Netfleet today and they have to literally write a new drop-catching program, pretty much from scratch. The entire Australian Domain Name Registry system is changing.

PLEASE KEEP THIS IN MIND.

Netfleet have officially released this statement:

Hi Domainers

The registry transfer is taking place this weekend, please note the following:

1. Registry Downtime
Registry services will be down from 8am this Saturday (30th June) to 8pm Sunday (1st July). This means that during this time you will not be able to renew, transfer or make changes to your domain names.

2. Domain Renewals
If your domain name expires this week or next, please renew it before 29th June. Send us an email at support@netfleet.com.au if you require assistance.

3. Drop Auction
To ensure data integrity after the transfer, there won’t be any drops for up to 14 days after the transfer takes place. It is possible that the drops will be reinstated before the end of the 14 days but a date has not yet been set. The daily drop list will still be published, all domain names will drop on the first day of reinstatement.

Don’t hesitate to email us if you have any questions.

Kind regards

The Netfleet Team

During this time, a simple way for you to keep up to date with the Daily Droplist is to use the NameBid system.

In NameBid, as long as you’re LOGGED IN, you can give a GREEN TICK to the domain names you are interested in, and then these will be saved every day into your WATCHLIST that only YOU can see.

To access the daily drop-list on NameBid, simply click on DOMAINS and .AU DROPLIST from the top left menu bar.

namebid drop platform

At the end of the 14-day blackout, you’ll have your complete list of domain names compiled in NameBid in your WATCHLIST, and you’ll be ready to make your bids on Netfleet.

I personally use the NameBid system everyday on my mobile phone to choose my drop-domain-names.

I hope we can have the NameBid Daily Drop system working properly for you on Monday…

Next week is going to be VERY INTERESTING for Australian domain names 🙂

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