On Fri, 29 Jun 2007, Lea de Groot wrote:

 > On Fri, 29 Jun 2007 13:26:11 +1000, Marty Drill - Domain Candy wrote:
 > > If .au opens up (and .net.au etc is kept, with com.au getting .au 
 > > (for example)), what is to stop companies from becoming 2LD 
 > > Registrars. So if "Bob" registered bank.au, then he could effectively 
 > > run his own 2LD. Some might argue that it is a free market, so be it. 
 > > However, it fundamentally devalues the existing 2LDs and can cause 
 > > confusion in the marketplace (as au.com did).

If there were 100,000 whatever.au domains then com.au, net.au, org.au,
asn.au, id.au, edu.au and gov.au become just those few out of 100,000,
ie essentially worthless, and I'm not referring to monetary value.

To allow direct registrations under .au would be to dismantle the worth
of the existing system, which may be the agenda of some promoting that.

Many of the public submissions have made similar points, better put, but
Marty's point about anybody sublicencing subdomains of whatever.au isn't
something I saw mentioned on at least a cursory read of all submissions.

 > My take on this is that provided my existing domains are grandfathered, 
 > then I don't care if the top level is opened in addition - I would 
 > probably prefer future domains directly in the .au space, but I dread 
 > my current .com.au domains being taken away from me. Too high an 
 > investment in the current property. And, no, replacing it with 
 > something else would not help.

I don't think anyone's proposed 'removing' com.au or any other 2ld.au
domains; just making them near worthless so you have to buy others :)

[..]

 > There was recently some furore over qld.edu.au running 4lds for the 
 > schools.
 > Whoever runs the edu.au (I forget their name; I don't deal with them) 
 > was complaining that qld should pay extra fees to do so (very rough 
 > summary - large white paper involved) or simply shouldn't do it.

Can you post any pointers to publicly accessible discussion of that?

This is quite interesting because anybody can create any subdomains of
their licenced Open .2ld.au domains, as many have long been doing, but I
know nothing at all about subdelegations or fees for such in edu.au.

 > I can see similar issues with the .au space.
 > Some people offer similar services under .com domains, such as the 
 > mentioned .au.com, and the ongoing problem for clients is that it looks 
 > legit to them, but they aren't buying through an accredited registrar 
 > and are at the whim of the supplier, with no protections.

Indeed.

Well, anyone licencing example.com.au can delegate as many subdomains as
they want or need for their operation.  You don't need permission from
the administration of net.au to delegate whatever.example.net.au, nor do
you need another licence.  Whether subdom.example.org.au is a hostname
or a delegated subdomain can be quite hard to tell, if the DNS servers
for example.org.au choose not to publicise all of the gory (sub)details. 

 > Banning this practice would have interesting side effects, for edge 
 > cases, eg. I recently said to my husband that we should pick up 
 > tom.id.au, dick.id,au and harry.id.au for the kids so they would have 
 > them when they are older (err, those aren't really their names ;)).

Pity .. then they may have been eligible, if perhaps a bit late :)

 > He said we would just give them access to tom.degroot.id.au, etc.
 > But this would probably be against the rules, if we also wanted to stop 
 > people from selling something.bank.au without being a registrar.

There's no rule against creating subdomains of any open *.2ld.au that
I'm aware of.  In the olden days, pre AuDA, there was a prohibition on
subdomains of *.id.au but that was dropped after AuDA took it over. 

Of course edu.au, gov.au, csiro.au etc do their own thing, but that
thing includes delegating sub. and sub.sub.domains as required. 

Selling them, of course, would be an entirely different matter.  Since
you can't sell .au domains anyway, neither could you 'sell' subdomains. 

But then, open selling of [*.]*.au domains is the =MAIN= policy the open
slatherers want changed in their favour; this one is just a distraction.

Cheers, Ian