Today’s blog post provides an update of the July 2019 .au registrar briefing, held last week at auDA’s offices in Melbourne. We have come a long way since our last briefing in April, with the announcement of direct registration coming to .au in Q4 2019 in the front of everyone’s minds.
Registrars in attendance included Arq Group, VentraIP, Terrific, Education Services Australia, Trellian and DDNS. Dialling in to attend via teleconference were MarkMonitor, Netfleet and additional delegates from Arq Group. To ensure that all registrars were given the opportunity to provide feedback, a teleconference covering the same content was held for those in the North American time-zone on Thursday morning, including attendees from GoDaddy and CSC.
Representatives from auDA included Cameron Boardman, Chief Executive Officer, Bruce Tonkin, Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Maiden, Head of Stakeholder Engagement, Will Bond, Marketing and Communications Manager and Steph Viljoen and Daniel Young from the Compliance team. Attendees from Afilias Australia included Pat Donaldson, Country Manager, Gaby Facci, Tech Support Team Lead and myself, Greta Adamo, Marketing Coordinator.
An update on .au policies and processes
To begin, Bruce Tonkin gave an update on the status of the new draft licencing agreements and policies that have recently been distributed.
Software requirements for the launch were discussed, including details regarding integration and processes to be followed by .au registrars for different categories of second level domain name applicants.
This will be managed through the assignment of priority ID codes at the beginning of the 6 month Priority Registration period, depending on 3 categories of application type:
General availability: When the applicant is applying for an available .au domain name (that is, no existing matching domain names in the registry)
Category 1: When the applicant holds the only existing domain name across .au zones and applies for the name at second level (e.g. the applicant owns forexample.com.au and there are no other forexample names across zones)
Category 2: Cases where there are multiple existing domain names in different .au zones (e.g. forexample.com.au, forexample.net.au and forexample.org.au all exist).
More information is available in auDA’s draft rules for priority registration. These draft policies and the previously mentioned licensing agreements are provided to ensure that existing registrants are fully protected when .au names become available.
Launching .au to the Australian public
Before things wrapped up, auDA and Afilias AU wanted to give registrars the chance to respond to the plans for launching .au to the Australian public.
A snapshot presentation on .au branding, including draft messaging and visual elements was given by the creative agency and there was positive feedback from everyone in the room, which was encouraging.
To close the meeting auDA CEO Cameron Boardman encouraged registrars to apply for Co-Marketing funding over the coming months and stressed the importance of ensuring a high level of public understanding of second level .au domain names. While there is still a lot of work to be done before launch, the project is tracking well and we are excited at the progress made so far.
If you have some feedback, a question or idea remember you can reach us at blog@afilias.com.au