Hi Nigel,

...and of course yes, you are spot on... the comparitive cost between a
.com, and a .com.au is also a significant factor to my customers (why buy at
David Jones when you can buy the same thing from KMart at half the price?).
There are no organisations doing any real marketing of the benefits of the
.au extension, so why should the market consider it to be "better"... when
to the customer, all it is is dearer, harder to register (and more of a
headache for the ISP), and simply contains more letters for site visitors to
type in the URL?... and perhaps most significantly, whenever I explain to
customers the requirements to obtain a .au domain name, I usually hear the
comment that this is just another system destroyed by bureacracy... not at
all what the Internet should be... a lot of people refuse to purchase a .au
extension simply on philosophical grounds.

To me, perhaps the most significant sign of this "cultural shift" is the
number of small Australian towns registering themselves with a .com or
.org - Six months ago the mindset was that a Council or other body must have
an .au extension so visitors knew they were in Australia...  however
nowadays, (6 months in realtime but 3.5 years later in Internet time),
people are beginning to realise that the domain extension is
insignificant... visitors to a site will read the keywords on a Search
Engine, not the domain extension of the URL... and as more and more Search
Engines don't even list the URL (just a "Click Here" button), the domain
extension has become largely superfluous (at least this is the feedback I am
getting).

Cheers, Don