The board of .au Domain Administration has approved a set of recommendations in principle, and one of them would remove one of the allocation tests applicants can use to register a .com.au or .net.au domain. The panel majority’s stated aim is to put applicants on a more consistent footing, having found the route unfair to small businesses competing with investors. The decision was taken at the board’s August meeting and published on September 6. It followed a year-long review by an external policy advisory panel, and this was the one recommendation the panel could not agree on. Every other recommendation was adopted by consensus. On this one four members voted for removal, two voted to keep the status quo and one abstained. A separate recommendation in the same package leaves domain monetization allowed.
What has not happened matters as much as what has. auDA has not changed any rule. Its own statement says management was directed to prepare an implementation plan, then draft the rule changes, and put those drafts out for public consultation before anything takes effect. No commencement date has been announced, and auDA says transition arrangements will be covered in updates over the coming months.
Key facts
- The contested one: Recommendation 2 calls for deleting subparagraph (f) of rule 2.4.4(2), which lets a domain match or be a synonym of the name of a service, goods, an event, an activity or premises.
- Approved alongside it: Recommendation 1 keeps domain monetization allowed in com.au, net.au and .au direct, a pairing the minority calls inconsistent.
- The panel split: Erhan Karabardak and Niluka Welungoda opposed it; Anthony Peake abstained and later expressed support for their view.
- The proxy: 3,386 registrants each hold more than 50 licenses, together accounting for 582,895 names, the report’s stand-in for potential investor holdings, not a count of who relies on subparagraph (f).
The Clause That Has Been There Since the Early Days
To hold a .com.au or .net.au license, an applicant must be a commercial entity with an Australian presence and satisfy one of the allocation tests in rule 2.4.4. The report calls the other tests objective and verifiable, and they require documentary evidence tying the domain to the applicant, such as a company name, a business name or a trademark. Subparagraph (f) is the exception. It allows a domain that is a match or synonym of the name of a service the applicant provides, goods it sells, an event it registers or sponsors, an activity it teaches, or premises it operates. For context, auDA’s July registry report counts 3,298,387 com.au names, with a further 179,132 in net.au.
The final report describes that clause as the former “close and substantial connection” test, in place since the early days of .com.au and folded into the licensing policies around 2017. Removing it, the report states plainly, “effectively limits a registrant to registering a domain name that matches its name, business name or trade mark.” In auDA’s own summary of what would remain, a domain would need to be a match or an acronym of a registered name, including a company, business, statutory, personal, partnership or trust name, or a match of an Australian trademark.
Two Pathways of Unequal Difficulty
The majority’s reasoning is about fairness between applicants. It found the current rules create two pathways of unequal difficulty: applicants relying on the other subparagraphs must produce documentary evidence, while an applicant relying on (f) can stand up a referral service with what the report calls “minimal administrative barriers.” The majority saw that as unfair to small businesses, sole traders and start-ups competing against investors registering names for resale. It noted that advances in artificial intelligence have made pay-per-click sites easier to produce, and that allocation compliance rests on a registrant warranty rather than a database check.
What the panel did not recommend is a ban on the activity itself. Recommendation 1, approved in the same package, makes no change to the rules allowing domain monetization in com.au, net.au and .au direct. The minority treats that pairing as a contradiction, calling the decision to permit monetization “the correct position” but “inconsistent with the recommendation to delete subparagraph (f).”
The Report’s Proxy for Investor Holdings
The same report contains the panel’s attempt to size that group. There is no definitive way to identify who holds names for monetization, the report says, so the panel used holdings above 50 licenses as a proxy, while acknowledging that some registrants pass that line for reasons such as brand protection. On that measure it counts 3,386 registrants, holding 582,895 domain names, in namespaces with 1,702,174 registrants in total. By our arithmetic that is roughly one registrant in 500.
Two Members Put the Objection on the Record
The minority view runs to ten numbered points inside the final report. Its central argument is that deleting the clause moves a cost rather than removing a behavior. Describing those few thousand registrants as a small, sophisticated group, the minority writes that “a matching business name, trust or entity is a trivial, one-off cost of doing business,” while the rule “falls hardest on the far larger population of small businesses whose domain doesn’t match their registered name.”
The minority estimates the change could reach one million registrants, and cites a submission putting the increased annual cost to Australians at around A$30 million. Both figures are the minority’s, not findings of the panel, which states that it did not carry out costings of its own. The minority lists schools registering a domain for an annual fete, charities for a fundraising campaign and sporting clubs for an oval, pitch or other venue. It also points to generic terms such as live, shoes and tyres, which it argues cannot be registered as a business name or a trademark.
One point bears directly on registrars. The recommendation, the minority writes, “does not address the impact on existing registrants who currently rely on subparagraph (f) to maintain their licence, nor whether any transition or grandfathering arrangements would apply.”
What Happens Next
auDA’s stated sequence is an implementation plan, then drafted rule changes, then publication of those drafts with an explanatory guide for public consultation. The consultation behind the recommendations ran from September 2025 to July 2026 and drew 78 written submissions. Anyone whose customers rely on subparagraph (f) gets at least one more opportunity to file a position before the rules are settled.
About the Data
The status of the decision, the wording of what would replace subparagraph (f) and the next steps come from auDA’s statement of September 6. The text of the clause, the majority’s reasoning, the minority view with its named members, the cost estimate and the consultation figures come from the panel’s final report. Domain counts for com.au and net.au come from auDA’s July registry report. The share of registrants holding more than 50 licenses is our own arithmetic on auDA’s figures.
