You may remember we initially noticed and contacted the owner of Australia.net.au to let him know he’d lost his domain name. He was “gutted” and rightfully so.
Well, you will be pleased to know that today it appears there are one or two people at auDA who are indeed listening to domain industry gripes and proactively doing something to fix “wrongs”.
There must have been quite a number of meetings and a bit of work involved in this, reinstating the australia.net.au to the original owner who had owned it for 22 years when it was ripped away from him due to the controversially updated Reserved Policy List (which still has a lot wrong with it, as I’m sure will be revealed again in the not-too-distant future!)
However, for now… Well done auDA. Please keep it up!
That is great news Rob.
It was definitely a huge injustice and clearly demonstrated the flaws in the system that would allow that to happen in the first place.
Good result in the end, but in my opinion it was avoidable in the first place. All systems are inherently flawed which is why the policy was built with safeguards in place. If auDA had followed the policy and attempted to deleted the domain name then the internal and external review processes available to registrants would have dealt with this exception and the domain would not have been taken offline during the process.
In my opinion the serverRenewProhibited (combined with serverTransferProhibited) status should not be used by auDA ever again because it denies registrants the right to internal and external review while a domain is still registered.
Agreed, it shouldn’t have happened in the first place. The fact auDA have now given the name back, proves this was A MISTAKE.
Spot on, Anthony, “serverRenewProhibited” should NEVER be used by auDA again, and they should take notice to turn it off now, as we can see by the updated Reserved Policy List we published, there are going to be MORE domain names wrongfully taken from owners over the coming months…