The world’s most trusted and popular professional Domain Name Industry website, since 2003, DNJournal.com, just weighed in on how the world is seeing the auDA Board’s monumental stupid decision to change Australian’s domain name licensing rules.
Everyone who is interested in Domain Names and Domain Investing, across the world, is reading this today.
https://www.dnjournal.com/archive/lowdown/2026/posts/0908.htm
In today’s DNJournal post, Ron Jackson writes:
In Bewildering Move Australia’s .AU Domain Administrator (AuDA) Decapitates Its Own .com.au SLD
The auDA Board Just Voted to Destroy the .com.au Name Space
auDA, the administrator of Australia’a .au top level domain and parent of second level versions like .com.au, .net.au and .org.au – decided to stab their loyal .com.au customers in the back by passing a rule that will make it too expensive for hundreds of thousands of domain owners to renew their names.
AuDA did this by passing a rule saying the registrant had to have a trademark or company name matching the domain they held in order to keep it. With the cost of getting a new business registration or trademark and maintaining it running into four figures many will lose names they bought in good faith years ago thanks to AuDA’s decision to change the rules in the middle of the game (a change that, not surprisingly, will make the government a ton of new revenue at the expense of Australia’s small business community).
It is quite odd that the new rule applies only to the .com.au flavor of Australian domains – not .net.au, .org.au or even the top level marquee domain – .au (a direct option that only opened to the public for the first time in 2022). Only .com.au – the one business people counted on – is affected in an inexplicable move that instantly makes it a toxic TLD.
One veteran Aussie domain investor/developer, Ned O’Meara, wondered if this was a calculated plan meant to drive up .au sales that, with about 300,000 registered domains, remain just a small fraction of the millions registered in .com.au. The issue with that now is how could anyone trust AuDA not to eventually pull the same bait and switch on .au holders thatthey have on com.au registrants? The one thing they have succeeded in doing with this move is taint the entirety of one of the world’s great country code TLDs.
The mistake is so monumental, we would guess that between now and when the rule gets implemented, auDA is going to face an enormous amount of blowback from the business community and a variety of legal challenges that may stop the madness before the damage is irreversible.
Even IF this monumental mistake is wound back before full catastrophic implementation, the damage has already been done. The current Board Members are clearly NO LONGER FIT to have a say in how the Australian domain name space should run. Not only have they allowed this monumental screw-up to occur in the first place, let’s not forget they have also continuously allowed a private monopoly drop auction to exist for 6 years, where one private company is judge, jury and executioner over WHO ultimately gets to acquire expired domain names and how much they have to pay for the privilege.
The specific auDA Board Members who thought this was a good idea to approve, who talked other weaker Board Members into actually going along with this insane, stupid idea, MUST be sacked and replaced by smarter, more logical and rational professionals who actually care about Australian businesses and entrepreneurs, and who want to preserve the past 26 year legacy history of how Australian domain names and the .au ccTLD have been seen by the world.
Who is the auDA Board as at September 2026?
- Marina Go, Sandra Davey, Peter Elford, Brett Fenton, Sarv Girn, Sandra Hook, Claire Rogers, Thu-Trang Tran, Mike Trovato, Tina Wyer.
And these people just green-lit this decision because of the recommendations of these 4 people; Matt Healy (Chair), Selvi Kannan, Ian Kelly, and Ross Creelman, who made up the majority of the au Licensing Rules Review Panel 2025, who CLAIM they “extensively” reached out to the public, but we claim they DID NOT “extensively” reach out to the public: auDA lied about ‘Policy Advisory Panel’ conducting an “extensive community consultation process”. Less than 0.019% of Australian businesses were informed.
More information about this whole debacle can be found in our first article: The day auDA ruined 26 years of Australian domain name trust and value.
Come on Australia, you are better than this!
Who are the auDA Directors?
What are their names and why did they vote for this?
auDA Board’s monumental stupidity is now international news, and growing” — headline really says it all. What gets me is this kind of overreach doesn’t just hurt .au, it chips away at trust in ccTLDs generally. Once registrants start worrying their domain could get pulled on a technicality, that fear sticks around for years, even after the policy gets reversed. Wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up being the case study other ccTLD registries point to next time they’re tempted to tighten renewal rules without grandfathering existing owners.
auDA won’t be around in 18 months
Both the panel and auDA have just breached their own terms of reference by undermining the trust and integrity of the name space – one third of names are now in jeopardy
Policy deletes will become a constant feature because business owners routinely fail to renew business names and trademarks in error or lose control of these things due to commercial dealings – a lapsed business name or trademark or one that is subject to legal dispute will now invariably result in loss of the domain name and hence destruction of the web site / online business itself
Any decision to implement this policy is disregards natural justice and will be fully contestable in Administrative Law
Existing registrants have rights and legitimate expectations associated with their licenses and removal of allocation criteria like this is effectively the revocation of licences according to the High Court
The panel documents make clear the intention of this policy change, and since they are public documents the evidence is damning for both auDA and the panel – the ‘no bias’, ‘improper purpose’, ‘unreasonableness’, ‘bad faith’ and ‘no evidence’ rules have all been breached
You say this like it is the first time that auDA has made a stupid decision. auDA constantly makes bad decisions. Assets’ website has been documenting the absurdity of auDA for years. .au Direct was canned in 2018 but then brought back again. AND it was a failure. No one wanted it except the leaders of auDA that had their bonuses tied to implementing .au Direct
auDA does what auDA does JUST for money. Why do you think that they just increased the cost of a yearly registration? It is to cover the shortfall of all of the deleted domains that are coming up.
I would say that there is a reason that this has been pushed in, and you will not understand the reason for the stupidity until you can follow the money.
Not only that, they will continue; they are not regulated, and they have never been influenced by logical thinking.
auDA does what they want and cannot be stopped by anyone. I would be happy to be proved wrong, but in my years of association with this industry, I have never been wrong about this.
One thing is for sure, it’s not .com.au that will suffer here. It’s auDA.
This move, which would be the greatest cannibalisation of a ccTLD in history.
Wonder when the cognitive dissonance will dissipate. Going to be an absolute bloodbath for Australian business.
A new business won’t be able to register a .com.au without first getting a business name or domain name. But ASIC do domain name checks before approving.
So if I want RonsWidgets.com.au as a domain, I need to first get RonsWidgets.com.au as a ASIC business name. ASIC does a domain check and says no you can’t have it. Then according to auDA policy I can’t have that domain because I don’t have the business name.
There are more than 1.5 million .com.au registrants currently relying on (f).
This is usually because eg. Sally’s Cupcake House Prahran uses SallysCupcakesOnline.com.au .. Sally will now need to register another business name or trademark to include the word ‘Online’ otherwise she loses her ecommerce site.
Or take (another fictional example) Tom’s Pest Control who uses dozens of satellite sites to draw inbound leads for long tail keywords eg. pestcontroldubbo.com.au, pestcontrolorange.com.au, pestcontrolforbes.com.au .. poor Tom now has to register dozens of new business names or trademarks to maintain his sites.
I look forward to seeing thousands of generic names held by corporates being policy deleted by agile small business owners.
Is there no other government body, ombudsman or politician who can step in and rescue this disaster?
More money for auDA Board Directors & their family Disney holidays!
“auDA Not Fit For Purpose” Department of Communications
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/web-agency-not-fit-for-purpose-government-review-finds-20180417-p4za3u.html
This article (Web agency not fit-for-purpose, government review finds) is from 2018. As you can see, nothing has changed. It is 8 years later, and you can see that they are still making decisions against the interests of Australians. auDA is untouchable.
“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play… How about a nice game of chess?”
A deep review of the biggest 1000 Companies in Australia showd 95% are directly affected by this crazy auDA UTURN back 25 yesrs.
95% of their .com.au and .net.au will not be eligible to keep. Renew. Transfer.
Massive companies include some who paid auDA directly $143,000 for premium reserved auDA warehoused names like FLOWERS.COM.AU
Yes auDA Breached the ICANN and own rules around “warehousing” domain names. Auda warehoused all generic domains then sold them profitting over $3 million…not bad for a “not for profit”
FLOWERS.COM.AU
CARS.COM.AU
LAWYERS.COM.AU
etc
auDA’s auction of more than 3,000 and subsequent rug pull means it has breached its contract with those 3,000 registrants. They can sue auDA for breach of contract. This is outside of legal challenges that can be brought for abuse of natural justice.
The question is, who is affected enough, AND has deep enough pockets to take on auDA? Whoever that is, someone needs to be getting in their ear right now.
Cutting off the nose to spite the face. Taking back a million plus domains from investors or others which are a continuous and current stream of income in several ways, then over regulating their access to one or few going forward, will mean a million plus extra domains will sit like rotten fruit in the shop, earning nothing for no one. Imbeciles!