As we wrote about back in November 2018, auDA’s reserved policy list continues to wrongly claw-back highly generic domain names from people who have owned them for decades.
We published a list of 75 highly generic domain names that SHOULD NOT APPEAR ON A RESTRICTED LIST to own or buy. Yet, auDA chose to do nothing about it.
Perhaps they were too busy cleaning up the various controversies happening in their organisation over the past two years, such as when The Australian posted that “independent chairman Chris Leptos -alleged the then-auDA-CEO (Cameron Boardman) falsified his academic record by including a master of laws degree (LLM) from La Trobe University“
Today we take another look at another highly-generic domain name that’s ABOUT TO BE LOST.
According to Afilias, you can read that technically serverUpdateProhibited means:
serverUpdateProhibited
This status locks the domain, preventing it from being updated. It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes or auDA compliance review (auDRP).
This code now appears on the highly generic domain name Bank.com.au(.)
“Bank” is a popular Australian surname. It’s also the name of busy streets, for example, Bank Street, Melbourne.
What sort of a government or not-for-profit domain name governing body has the right to BAN generic-word domain names from being owned and purchased by the Australian public?
This doesn’t happen ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD!
The generic Bank.com.au domain name has been privately owned for DECADES. The owners initially paid for the domain name and auDA registration fees, year after year, thousands of dollars, and now auDA are literally just going to CLAW IT BACK with NO COMPENSATION and point to new additions to a “Reserved Policy List” and throw their arms up in the air like they can’t do anything about it.
What a ridiculous organisation who continues to obey stale, outdated and unfair policy rules in the year 2020.
Perhaps the new auDA CEO is going to come in and make some sense out of the previous few years of chaos and bring our domain name system into the future?
It’s just downright scary & this practice of taking names away when they’re actively/legitimately being used and paid for. I have heard similar stories with certain LLL acronym domain names being simply taken back!
It certainly does not warrant ‘investment’ by businesses owning short/desirable names in the .au namespace.
I have to disagree – this seems like a pretty reasonable application of policy. The Banking Act prohibits a company that is not an ADI from using the term “bank” to promote financial services. The registrant is using the domain to monetise click through traffic to financial institutions. There are good policy reasons that this name should be on the reserved list
Everyone’s entitled to their opinion Tim, but why should the Banking Act or auDA stop someone from opening up a cafe or nightclub called “Bank” and owning Bank.com.au?
In my opinion no government or organisation should ban a generic domain name from being used for legitimate purposes. No other country in the world does this with the term “Bank”.
I take your point Robert but the line needs to be drawn somewhere. If my business is located on Anzac Ave, does that mean I should be able to register Anzac.com.au? What if I run the Australia New Zealand Actuaries Convention?
Sometimes the policy rationale (in this case protecting consumers of financial services) overrides the minor inconvenience to some stakeholders (an individual wanting to promote their cafe online).
The only reason this domain has anything more than a nominal value is the potential traffic it can generate for financial services businesses. That comes with restrictions that were imposed by Commonwealth legislation