According to the AFR, “Mr Billson, the Australian small business and family enterprise ombudsman, has implored small business owners to safeguard their brand and block impersonators, known as web-name campers, from registering websites similar to their own.”
Web-name campers? Is this the new friendly way to describe cybersquatters?
“He has called on the non-government regulator to extend the exclusive access period for a further 12 months, to September 2023.”
AFR also reported, ““If you want [your .au Direct], small business owners, I urge you to take a few minutes and a few dollars to register it or potentially face someone else grabbing it and using it to digitally ambush your business, to demand big dollars later to surrender it to you, or misuse it to masquerade as you or to help them engage in cybercrime,” he said.”
auDA obviously have no possibility of extending the deadline to register your .au Direct as many people have already followed the rules and have been preparing for this for a long time and an extension would cause financial loss to all of those ‘.net.au’ and ‘.id.au’ holders who have let go, or lost their domain names.
auDA allowed Registrants to Register ‘.id.au’ domain names for decades, and then suddenly changed the rules at the last minute and removed the “Registration as a hobby” clause from policy recently.
Because of this recent policy change, it appears that auDA are deleting many ‘id.au’ domain names at the moment including;
- loans.id.au
- cars.id.au
- money.id.au
- car.id.au (owners initials, so probably ok)
- sydney.id.au
- perth.id.au
- gay.id.au
- lawyer.id.au
auDA and Registrars took their money for these registrations over decades, changed the rules at the last minute and now are deleting these domains in an effort to stop the Registrants from claiming the new matching .au Direct domain name.
It’s not clear if auDA and the Registrars involved are going to be refunding decades of fees to the Registrants of these domain names.
AFR also reported that the Small Business Ombudsman is very disappointed with auDA’s awareness campaign stating, “I’m not surprised so few people know about this as the public awareness campaign has been less than impactful, but I want to make sure small businesses avoid a horrible surprise when they find someone else is using or misusing the shortened version of their key digital asset being their domain name.”
Mr Billson said the consequences of not registering an existing business name by the deadline could be catastrophic for operators.”
AFR also reported that the Institute of Public Accountants general manager stated, “We rang 12 of our practising members around the country servicing small businesses and only one was aware of [.au Direct sunrise period ending in September].”
The last week of September is going to be very interesting indeed.
Read the full AFR article here.
auDA, Lawyers, Registrar’s don’t care. They make more money.
auDA paid themselves KPI Bonuses for bringing in the new competing unwanted direct .au chaos.
Look at the blackened out redacted auDA minutes.
Disgraceful
Ruined the trust stability confidence and users understanding .
Is this the first signs of the shitshow starting that you guys warned us was coming?
Too little too late Mr Billson!
That horse has already bolted and it ain’t going back in that barn without a swift kick to the balls to who ever tries.
You could extend the September deadline out by another 2 years and it would probably make zero difference as to how many businesses become “aware” that this is even an issue.
Rob & I did say this was a potential shit show on our 2 part podcast episodes on this topic which can be watched / listened to on these links below.
https://assets.com.au/domainer-show-episode-34-direct-au-is-coming/
https://assets.com.au/domainer-show-episode-35-direct-au-shitshow/
I have no doubt that things are going to get ugly after this September, but for many the time to act will have passed.
Is it time then for the lawyers to clip their ticket fighting registrations that current owners of the .com.au, net.au domains etc (auDA & Registrars have already) wake up to what they potentially are facing?
Let the games begin! I have my bags of popcorn & microwave at the ready.
The SS has started already. A couple of months ago there was a phishing scam using commbank.au email address. Of course, the scammers had not registered the domain, but because there was no DKIM on the DNS (in other words Commbank has not bothered to secure their .au Direct digital asset) it was not filtered out, and arrived in Inboxes looking legit.
Congratulations to this version of .auDA, you have finally implemented .au Direct. You can now put it in your CV that you did what previous versions of auDA did not do.
Pretty much! As Ed linked…