There is a new election soon in Australia and the word on the street is to get rid of the control freak regulating current goverment and vote in Greens or Labour for a much more open domain name market in aussie.
I don't expect that to happen. IMHO The greens and Liberal groups are much more behind a regulated and "commercial free" domain environment and would push for even tighter parking and domain registration requirements. The industry was still heavily influenced and controlled by academics who whant the internet to be above commerce and business interests.
seems like they have spent a lot of money to regulate all the online activity I don't think they are going to turn back now.....but you never know
i live in Australia and wow domain names having anything to do with politics is new to me....interesting...maybe it could be a trump topic at the next debate or at the Opec summit
Australia has regulated the .au domains in this fashion in attempt to stop global squatting, and to ensure the namespace remains somewhat clean for Australian Business and Citizens. What they have done is quite good in many ways, if you start up a business the chances of registering yourbusiness.com.au is pretty high. So yes it does intentionally suck for domaining, but it is a great system for legitimate uses.
Trust me, Australia doesn't loose out on taxes. That's like saying Google.com doesn't get many unique visitors!
If you haven't read already, this: http://www.auda.org.au/2007npp/2007npp-index/ is an interesting article.
I haven't seen, heard or read anythng about domain names in the election issues here in Oz. Here is a very basic question - please don't laugh or criticize me - I am genuine. If someone outside of Australia did a google search for something non australian - would .com.au sites come up in their results ? or do .com.au sites only come up in searches done in Australia? Appreciate any info Thanks TonyOz
Depends on a few criterea. If you were to do the search on Google.co.au, you would get tons of .au (and .com) results. But using just google.com, it would have to be the most relevant and popular website to get a high ranking (as all website do regardless of extention) Just so much .com content out there that the # of .au sites makes it a very small part of the "webventory"