It is official, auDA and Identity Digital have updated the contested direct .au domains for the 2nd year.
Drop had 1,500 contested names and 155 were just allocated to our clients. That is just over 10% of contested names are no longer contested and instead now in use. Great to see some amazing names get allocated.
This also means that nearly 90% of the contested names were renewed for another year, which is a much higher number than expected and at this rate will take many years to fully resolve.
The remaining Registrars had around 4,450 contested domains, will be interesting to hear from auDA how many are left in total.
I hope that auDA decides to fast track this with a policy change and potentially increase the renewal cost of these names to reduce this number faster and get the .au in use. Seems like a waste to have all the best names tied up like that.
Direct AU contested names updated for 2nd year
As the owner of a contested domain – and still believing that there is no hierarchy of rights within the naming system. I’d be happy for auDA to add a zero to the cost of the renewal of the priority application each year until there’s only one applicant left.
The only condition I’d have is the money raised went to a charity not auDA operational income or the foundation.
The problem is fairly small overall in a space of 4M domains / 500K+ .au registrations. I’d imagine most of the contested names have significant branding on the the already existing primary domain. So the fact they are locked away doesn’t appear to be causing any real impairment in the space.
Great idea Brett, Give the extra to charity.
As for No Hierarchy of rights, this to me is just wrong.
My biggest concern is what this is doing to the namespace and creating confusion for all Australians that can now be scammed into believing that any .au domains can be official Government sites, as the Government has claimed many of the .au domains and have given them official Government status and legitimacy. The Government should have stayed WELL CLEAR of this as this encourages bad players to create identity theft scams pretending to be Government departments now. They should delete every single .au that they have registered and make it clear that a Government site can ONLY be on a .gov.au extension.
Absolute waste of tax payer funds.