I think there is a problem with the Change of Registrant policy, 
the end result of which is that many .au domains have incorrect 
ownership (Registrant) information - which due to said policy
remains incorrect indefinitely.

I have a customer (A) who had us register a domain for their
customer (B) under the ABN and Name of (A).

The reason for this was that (B) hadn't finished incorporating
yet, and both (A) and (B) were extremely anxious to get a site
live, and hence a domain registered.

Now this is not an uncommon situation.  In several years of
managing domains and hosting thereof, I have come up against
incorrect Registrant details many times - typically where the
hosting company or web design company is the registrant - and
at one time or another the practice has been encountered with
ALL tiers of registrars and resellers, big and small.

Usually I do what I have to do to get things running, advise
the customer of the problem, and move on, the customer forgets
about it (or sees how much the Change process costs) and things
run fine and it's forgotten.

In this case though, one partner bought out the other partner
in the business, and has been particularly vigilant about
ensuring that the domain details are corrected.

I worked with my customer (B), his customer (A) and my registrar
to file a Change of Registrant - we all spent a significant
amount of time on it, the customer (A) shelled out a rather
large sum of money (imho) - only to have auDA reject the Change
of Registrant request because it didn't fit into any policy.

Now I've been advised that the only course of action is to
delete the domain and re-register it under the updated details.

I am puzzled that this is the only option available to us, and
it makes me wonder how many hundreds (or thousands?) of .au
domains are out there with incorrect or out-of-date Registrant
information, because in this situation, keeping Registrant
details current is actually _discouraged_ by auDA policy.

Have I missed something, or is this just the way it has to be?




-- 
Chris Langlands