Today’s blog post provides an overview of the April 2019 Registar Briefing held on Wednesday 17 April 2019.
Last week was a busy time for the .au namespace, with an auDA Board meeting on Monday, followed by the auDA Associate Membership Launch on Monday night and a registrar briefing on Wednesday evening.
Registrars in attendance included Discount Domain Name Services, Education Services Australia, Dreamscape Networks, Trellian and Arq Group. VentraIP, MarkMonitor, GoDaddy, Uniregistry, Netfleet and iiNet dialed in via teleconference.
Update on policy recommendations and changes
The presentation included the Management review of PRP panel recommendations and refinement of existing rules, which was finalised at the auDA Board meeting on Monday 15 April. The full presentation is available here.
Cameron Boardman, CEO of auDA recognised the need to promote principles such as fair trading, consumer protection and maintaining the operational stability of the .au ccTLD. He also spoke about the need to minimise confusion and uncertainty in regards to these policy changes and encouraged anyone with questions to contact auDA directly.
No proprietary interest and No hierarchy of rights
Two key decisions in regards to direct registration is that there will be no proprietary interest and no hierarchy of rights.
No proprietary interest means that ‘an existing registrant does not have the right to a domain name label to the exclusion of all other registrants.’ This means for example, mydomain.com.au does not have automatic right to the label ‘mydomain’ over other existing websites such as mydomain.net.au, mydomain.org.au.
No hierarchy of rights means that ‘no one registrant has a greater entitlement to a domain name than any other registrant with the same domain name label.’ As in the above example, mydomain.com.au does not have greater entitlement to the label ‘mydomain’ than mydomain.org.au.
Current status of auDA’s response to PRP recommendations
Mr Boardman was pleased to provide the update that as a result of Monday’s Board meeting, 14/25 recommendations have been implemented, 5/25 have been implemented in part and 6/25 have not yet been implemented.
A comprehensive list of recommendations, still open for public comment is available here.
.au direct registration
Bruce Tonkin, Chief Operating Officer at auDA looked at the process that is currently in place for the implementation of .au direct registration. His presentation covered key decisions including the length of the application period, contention resolution period and cut off date and competition and cost considerations that have been taken into account by the auDA Board.
There is still a significant amount of work to be done, but it is important to recognise that some key decisions were made this week as we continue to be transparent throughout the process of direct registration.
If you haven’t seen it, check out the ad released by auDA this week for the shorter names campaign - the emphasis being on the fact that ‘Aussie’s shorten everything’ and submit your feedback on direct registration at shorternames.com.au