Forwarding a message from Michael Malone:
> The recently Australian 2L domains are (at this time) all
> three letters (COM.AU, EDU.AU, GOV.AU, NET.AU, ASN.AU).
> Its using a different standard to the Europeans, which
> use all two letter domains where 2ld's exist at all.

Except, of course, for ID.AU (and friends csiro.au, oz.au et al)

> The COM.AU domain space is already too large, with 90%
> of all requests hitting the COM.AU name space. It
> is better to have a "flatter" structure, to distribute
> the hits a bit better.

It's already flat, like a huge pancake with a cherry on top. Anyway,

However responses I have read so far to the biz.au proposal
indicate that there is some resistance for companies to get any
domain name which is not in "com.au" - perhaps they don't see it as
"as legitimate a domain name" as a com.au name.

Using a 3LD (e.g. company.nsw.com.au) is one possibility; the current
com.au rules might be modified to permit Melbourne IT to register 4LDs
such as the above as part of their current operations.

Making the com.au tree deeper solves the distribution problem but it does
not address the issue of competing (or alternate) registries.

How about com1.au, com2.au, etc...? The hit rate on the com.au namespace
can be divided by 10 (or any number, as appropriate) & the 2LDs can be
run by separate organisations (all approved by kre, of course). I'm not
going to try to analyse the psychological implications of membership in
alternate com domains though.

Nick.
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