Australia’s domain name management system turns ten

This week marks the tenth anniversary since the shake-up of the system of management for Australian domains under the .au namespace and the opening-up of .id.au

It has gone almost unnoticed by the media, but this week marks the tenth anniversary since the shake-up of the system of management for Australian domains under the .au namespace.

Back in July 2002, responsibility for registering .au domains was transferred from Melbourne IT to AusRegistry, who licensed a small number of commercial registrars to perform the work on a competitive basis. Regulation was transferred from Robert Elz at the University of Melbourne to auDA. Thereafter, all requests for .com.au, .net.au, .org.au and .asn.au web addresses were processed via this system (.edu.au, .gov.au and .csiro.au remained under government control).

Today, there are a large number of licensed registrars who can process .au domain names.

This week also marks the 10th anniversary of the opening-up of the .id.au domain for Australian individuals. Prior to 1 July 2002, individuals who wanted to register a .id.au domain name had to make a personal application to a designated gatekeeper and would only be permitted a rather unattractive fourth-level name (under such domains as .echidna.id.au, .possum.id.au and even .dropbear.id.au).

The new scheme permitted the registration of names directly under .id.au for the first time. The first third-level domain name to be registered under the new scheme was kazza.id.au. This site’s domain – adonline.id.au – was registered in September 2002.

According to AusRegistry, there are now 12,750 .id.au domain names registered as of May 2012. This compares to 2.084 million .com.au names and 264,000 .net.au names. The domain space with the smallest number of registrations is .asn.au, with just 4,150 issued.

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