We were going to say Decimate, but decimate means 10% and this is far worse!
The Romans would decimate their own armies, killing 1 in 10 of their own soldiers to keep moral and to keep the rest in line.
auDA have taken this to the next level! We wrote about the domain name review panel making recommendations to the auDA board that will likely affect over 1 MILLION .com.au and .net.au existing domain registrations . “auDA Policy Review Recommendations Not Good For Domain Investors” which we strongly advised against that recommendation.
In a world gone crazy, the auDA board just announced that it has accepted various recommendations from the review panel, and the one that is a real blow to more than 35% of the existing name space:
Recommendation 2 – Allocation rules for com.au and net.au namespaces
Recommendation: The Panel recommends deleting subparagraph (f) from section
2.4.4 (2) of the .au Licensing Rules. Note a minority of the Panel did not support this
recommendation and instead supported the retention of the status quo.
Seems like the auDA board comprises of morons who have no real understanding of what they just did!
In a nut shell, every domain that is registered will have to have either a TM or Company name that matches the domains.
If you use a Trust = no longer eligible
If you acquired a business and kept the domain and let the other business name lapse = no longer eligible.
If you have a product you sell and have a domain of that product = no longer eligible
If you have a miss-type of your own company name = no longer eligible
If you want to register a domain for an event or occasion = no longer eligible
and many other cases of this…
You will be forced to register with ASIC a new business name which on average $650 extra per year with accountants fees, or a TM which is closer to $900 with legal fees, and then perform a Change of Registrant on any domain that is under the old entity to the new business name. A Business name or TM that will only be used to hold the domain and for nothing else!
The clear winner is the Government and their ASIC and TM services, that will have an influx of new businesses and Trade Marks that need to be registered and then used for all the existing domains and all new domain registrations. One million new business names will be needed. Great on the books to say look our economy is booming as small business has a huge growth thanks to our policies. What a joke, not a single one of these new businesses will ever trade or employ new staff.
They have just created a brand new tax on small business, costing Australian businesses OVER $500 MILLION to fix existing domain registrations, and will cost every year that after over $200 million per year to maintain , plus the unknown costs to all the Registrars that will be required to enforce this and the damage that this will do to existing domain registrants that will not understand why they are no longer eligible to keep a domain that they have owned for 20 years.
The auDA board did not even consider how this will affect the whole name space as it will severely diminish the trust of .com.au and every Registrar that offers this extension. The staff needed to notify existing customer to perform that many Change of Registrants is not a a task that any big Registrar will be able to do.
If someone were to do a whois check on any random domain, 1 in 3 will no longer be eligible and a complaint can be raised with the Registrar. You can expect that some will not be happy with auDA and will be doing mass submissions of domains that they want to be deleted, great time for companies like Drop that catch expired and policy delete domains, as many of the great domains held by real end users with real existing websites will be caught up in this and will lose domains that they have owned and operated for years in some cases 20 years or more.
The Registry operator Affinity Digital were handed a huge cut in revenues, potentially losing 30% with a single policy change. Every big Registrar like Godaddy, VentraIP, Synergy, CrazyDomains etc.. are about to go through a lot of pain and expense in helping their hundreds of thousands of clients and will lose many domain name registrations as a result. Registrars like Above , Drop, Help and who are small or industry focused will have a much easier task to mitigate this, with fewer clients that they need to assist.
We are lost for words and can not understand what the actual reasons were to change the current policy to something that will affect over 1 million existing domains. The end users that are going to be affected by this is going to be staggering. Makes you wonder if this was Government driven as they are the clear winner here.
I suppose we should be thanking auDA for making .com.au even more expensive to buy now on the aftermarket, as it will once gain come with an Entity that you will need to buy to maintain eligibility. The price of a domain has just gone up by $500, that is wonderful news for the Revenue numbers for drop catchers and domain marketplaces. Yes that was a sarcastic thank you!
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