Australia mulls dumping the .com from .com.au – so you can bake URLs like chocolate.gate.au

Australia may ditch the .com in .com.au and offer citizens straight .au domain names following increased competition from the explosion of dot-word addresses. A discussion paper [PDF] published by the .AU Domain Administration (AuDA) puts forward the case for making the aforementioned change. It notes that while it has …

[Ole Juul]

Shop by URL

Am I the only one who, if looking for flowers, would not start typing out a URL in the hopes of finding what I want?

[Martin Budden]

Re: Shop by URL

If I'm looking for flowers I go out in my backyard. YMMV.

[boba1l0s2k9]

Re: Shop by URL

Your back yard seems like a good choice. What's your address?

[Bubba Von Braun]

Chris must need more cigars

AuDA supply of Cuban's must be running low.. Just a sad money grab, as those with existing .com.au will of course register .au's so AuDA gets the growth they want.

Address bar search queries have obsoleted guessable addresses..

[Gray Ham]

Re: Chris must need more cigars

It may be a money grab, but if they have to have an Australian presence to register a name, are you going to object to:

augustiner.br.au

lowen.br.au

hof.br.au

etc ... ?

[veti]

Re: Chris must need more cigars

Presumably some Australian off-license chain would register 'br.au', and then how they choose to sell the sub-brands is up to them.

At least, subject to the inevitable trademark suits from their rightful owners, obviously.

[Stoneshop]

Re: Chris must need more cigars

ziemlich.schl.au

[Tac Eht Xilef]

Sooo...

I take it MelbourneIT's profits are down the shitter?

Good. DIAF.

[Jamie Jones]

No need to copy

Hey, Oz!

Just because the rest of the world is stupidly flattening the DNS hierarchy for no good reason, doesn't mean you should be as dumb too!

Jamie (old enough to remember *.oz.au)

[Phuq Witt]

Dot Oz?

I wonder why they wouldn't just go for a simple .OZ as their TLD? It's right up there with US, UK and NZ, as regards "instant brand recognition", whereas .AU looks [to me anyway] like it might be the TLD for Austria.

I presume countries do have some say in what their 'official' 2- or 3-letter abbreviation is?

[Edward Phillips]

Re: Dot Oz?

No they don't. It's drawn from an ISO list (ISO 3166-1 alpha 2, for the pedants out there). One or two early adopters cheated slightly (.uk) but otherwise it's fixed.

[Anonymous IV]

Re: Dot Oz?

Soon be time to look up whether .en, .sc, .wa and .ni are still available for use...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Dot Oz?

Sorry, Scotland have already gone with .scot, earlier this year.

[Vic]

Re: Dot Oz?

Soon be time to look up whether .en, .sc, .wa and .ni are still available for use...

There will be a bunfight for knights.who.say.ni ...

Vic.

[Christoph]

Re: Dot Oz?

That was what they used originally. It got changed over years back to the standard ISO value - I think partly because businesses were starting to use the net and winged that .oz wasn't businesslike.

[James Ashton]

Re: Dot Oz?

Long ago, like in the 80s, there was ".oz" for Australia but it didn't survive the move to use the international standard for two-letter country codes so we changed, with a brief transition via ".oz.au". Only ".uk" seems to have managed to break the rules in that respect.

[Cuddles]

Wait, the UK moved everything from .co.uk to just .uk? When did this happen, and why am I reading about it at theregister.co.uk?

[BoldMan]

Nothing "moved", they just allowed people to buy x.uk as well as x.co.uk

[Vic]

they just allowed people to buy x.uk as well as x.co.uk

Does anyone know the formal rules for that?

I have a .org.uk. The .uk is still unregistered, and the .co.uk is registered to a domain squatter. And I want to find out when I can go for the .uk without flagging that up to a squatter with priority rights...

Vic.

[mathew42]

Hierarchy adds value

I think the hierarchy adds value, although possibly not as much as in the past. If I visit a site and the URL is *.gov.au, then there is a stronger change it is a website run by an Australian Federal government department. If it is *.wa.gov.au then I can assume it is a website from the Western Australian State government department. If the website ends is *.edu.au, then it is an educational institution of varying quality.

The distinction between .com.au, .net.au, .org.au & .asn.au is more open to interpretation and the correct place for an entity can change over time.

[Charlie Clark]

Flawed logic

The reason for the proposed change is because of suspected competition from things like .shit? Simple economics suggest it won't work, except for forcing existing .com.au users to buy an additional domain.

I've always like the two-tier, taxonomic approach as it removes ambiguity. National domain registries should essentially be administering a common resource, charging only administrative costs only. This lowers overall costs and increases trust. Oh, well.