Imagine what the new gTLDs will do for the .au space? There will be so many 
'cool' domain names available and with 10 or so extensions to choose from, 
a .au domain name will be 'uncool'. I really think that the .au space is now 
nearly destroyed because of poor management skills of the space. Too strict 
to some companies, easy on others. It's just too inconsistent. It kind of 
reminds me of the management at Telstra and how they organise things. 

They need to get their act together quickly before the new namespace will 
be .au.com. I am very surprised how well that has gone, they probably have 
more .au.com subdomains than .com.au domain names within another 
12 months. 

But David Jones will never willing be undersold ;) 

(DJs will meet any other store price. I haven't seen any price reductions from 
INA because of other cheaper domain names, just a GST increase). 

Regards,
Nigel 

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 11/21/00, at 3:28 AM, Don Cameron wrote: 

>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
>
>
>
>--
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**************************************************
Nigel Burke
Sales Department
AVS Network
(02) 4283 1582
http://avs.net.au
**************************************************