Although I agree that the .id.au name space needs increased marketing
support and think that it is great that AusRegistry are taking the leading
role to promote the industry, I was interested reading that Ausregistry's
promotions tactic is to give away 50,000 .id.au registrations in the next
year. 

In my opinion, consumers are very much creatures of conditioned learning and
if a product/service is provided for free they will have the expectations
that it  and associated products (eg. .com.au) should always be free. See
the latest hotmail/ninemsn subscription figures. Just 7000 hotmail/ninemsn
users have signed up for the premium service offering.

Obviously the benefits of increased .id.au exposure in everyday email usage
thanks to 50,000 registrants will be quite large but I'd genuinely like to
have more of an insight into the marketing theory on how they will convert
consumers awareness of the .id.au namespace to actually registering a domain
and also how this will actually help grow and promote the .id.au and .au
name space as whole in the long term.

I'm also curious in how the .id.au giveaway process will operate. I assume
that they will either give an allocation of the 50,000 domain spots to each
registar  or maybe Ausregistry will give coupans away directly  to consumers
that can be redeemed at the registrar.  I'd really like to hope that they
include resellers in the process and give us the opportunity to promote the
.id.au namespace as well.