] >Companies that already have, or propose to obtain, a com.au domain, will
] >have to seriously consider reserving the same name in the biz.au domain,
] >firstly to ensure that they can be found under either name, and secondly,
] >and perhaps most importantly, to prevent another entity from acquiring
] >rights to the name.  We certainly don't want to go down the track of the 
] >USA where domain names are being acquired for speculative purposes.
] 
] We are already there. As soon as DNA's charge money for domain names,
] speculative name acqusition will occur, has occurred, is occurring, and will
] keep occurring. .COM is again the canonical example of this.
 
It seems to me there is a big difference between com.au and com which
makes speculative name acquistion much harder in com.au.  You need to be
able to claim some real world (ACN/ARBN-style) connection to a com.au
name in order to register it.

There seems to be a common question about why we need another domain which
is intended to be just the same as com.au (modulo things like whether you
can have generic or dictionary words).

One answer was that com.au is not really ready for competition like this
right now, in terms of policy and politics.

I also suggest that com.au may be inappropriate if there is seen to be a
"research" element to this proposal (or risk, to look at it from another
perspective).  When you have a domain with hundreds (?) of registrations
per week, you want something solid and reliable, rather than a system
which has only been developed recently.  If something stuffs up, it will
do so in a very major way.  Better to start at the shallow end.

Michael Malone put forward four reasons for proposing biz.au :-

a) Provide a working model of competitive registries within a
   single domain;

b) Provide a commercial environment for the development of the
   software required to run these registries;

c) Offer -some- competition to Melbourne IT;

d) Begin to remove the belief that COM.AU is the only place
   for "real" businesses.

It seems to me that none of (a)-(c) require the domain to have the same
"flavour" as com.au.  So rather than testing this cooperative/competitive
model in com.au (risky), or setting up a clone of com.au (like biz.au),
what about setting up something different?

The idea of "acn.au" has been kicked around here a bit recently, but
I'm not convinced that there will be a lot of market demand for this.
As some people may have found with id.au (and maybe .us) there's not
a lot of point in setting up a nice, sensible, scalable hierarchy if
no one wants to use it.

What about having a domain designed for products/services/trademarks?
This is something which is not catered for in the existing .au system
(apart from registering within the company's domain).

I'm sure Smith's would be quite interested in being able to advertise
something like www.twisties.prod.au.  The number of www.<movie>.com
addresses suggests that this is something the market is prepared to
pay for.

The next argument is whether it is better to educate/frustrate the
people who don't understand that the DNS is not a directory service,
by creating more domains to choose from (making it harder for people
to mis-use as if it were a directory service); or to yield to what
the market wants, however dumb that might be.

Another question is how many companies are going to use biz.au if the
DNAs for it have already suggested that they want to be in com.au, and
there is an expectation that this might be possible in a few months.

Michael and Simon might also like to consider whether a number of the
objectives could be met by testing this proposal on an existing id.au
domain.  I suggest that from a research point of view this certainly
addresses (a) and perhaps also (b).

As an id.au administrator myself, I'd be happy to see an alternative
to the bits of perl I've hacked up which do part of the job, based on
some of the code from ftp://ftp.aunic.net/aunic/.  :-)
__________________________________________________________________________
David Keegel <djk&#167;cyber.com.au>  http://www.cyber.com.au/  +61 3 9642-5997
Cybersource P/L: Unix Systems Administration and TCP/IP network management