Well I agree. 

Educating people about .com.au is much harder than simply .au - may as well
drop the com in com.au - it's just an additional, unnecessary barrier to
adoption of names ending in .au

Larry

-----Original Message-----
From: dns-bounces+larry.bloch=netregistry.com.au§dotau.org
[mailto:dns-bounces+larry.bloch=netregistry.com.au§dotau.org] On Behalf Of
Edwin Groothuis
Sent: Thursday, 8 June 2006 7:12
To: .au DNS Discussion List
Subject: Re: [DNS] france ditches magic number requirement Re:
Domaindisputeheats up


On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 05:58:53PM +1000, Larry Bloch wrote:
> Firstly, who pay's your bills? Your antipathy to businesses making a 
> buck
[...]
> makes us just like everybody else.
>
> Secondly, I have no issue with the rest of your post - it's quite 
> interesting - good research.
> 
> What it does show is that Belgium, Netherlands and Germany - three 
> countries generally accepted to be advanced wrt the development of 
> their internet economies have dramatically higher ccTLD domain per 
> capita penetration than Australia.
> 
> The missing piece of the puzzle here is not what this says about the 
> relative wealth of these countries, but rather how well supported 
> their businesses communities are by the domestic domain name industry 
> and regulatory regime.

You're missing one important but interesting thing, one which I didn't know
until I moved to Australia: The culture and language barrier.

In Europe (with the exception of the UK and Gibraltar), when reading english
books and watching english movies, you always keep in mind "this is not my
native language, so things might be different from how I have them here".
Miles vs kilometers, dollars vs (guilders/francs/marks), the Atlantic ocean
at the east vs west, dot-com vs punt-n-l vs punkt-d-e.

In the UK, and Australia, this language barrier isn't there, and people pick
up the jargon much faster and make it their own much faster than localized
versions. If 90% of the native-language magazines advertise themselves on
the cover as foo.com, people will start believe that .com is the way to go.
If life-style TV shows, happily imported from the USA, constantly show
oprah.com and drphil.com as the place to go for more information, then
people will start to believe that .com is the way to go. It's being told to
them in their own language, they see it with their own eyes.

Educating them that .com.au is the right way to go will only more give you
faces like you are an idiot who has no clue about how things are handled
here.


Chello, an european ISP (don't know if they're still around), had chello.cc
for every country they were in. People wouldn't have accepted anything else,
because they associate .com with the USA. Telstra uses bigpond.com (great
role-model...), people don't complain. QED.

Edwin

-- 
Edwin Groothuis      |            Personal website: http://www.mavetju.org
edwin§mavetju.org    |          Weblog: http://weblog.barnet.com.au/edwin/
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