Consultation Period:
November 16, 2017 16:00 AEDT to December 18, 2017 17:00 AEDT
The terms of the Australian Government’s endorsement of the .au Domain Administration (auDA) as the appropriate entity to administer Australia’s top-level domain (.au) on behalf of Australian internet users were established in 2000.
Since that time the digital landscape has changed significantly and it’s important to ensure the management of the .au domain remains fit for purpose.
The review will examine and make recommendations on:
the most appropriate framework for the management of the .au top level domain
how to ensure that Government and community expectations inform auDA’s operation and decision-making, and
mitigation strategies to address future risks to the security and stability of .au.
We will consider written submissions in response to the discussion paper. We expect to report outcomes of the review to the Minister for Communications in early 2018.[/quote]
My personal recommendation is leave sleeping dogs lie. AuDA only got the role because Robert Elz was too “Australian” (i.e. an uncontrollable academic technocrat) for management to handle. The History section of the Discussion Paper whitewashes a rather nasty legacy. There Be Dragons Here.
Uh-huh, that’s something of an understatement. I, however, am far too familiar with the topic. Let’s put it this way; somewhere buried amongst the archives I have a copy of the last .net.au zone file served by the original registry which managed that namespace. Originally they were free, but you had to prove you were operating or provisioning a network, like an ISP. That’s why all those little community BBS/ISP outfits migrated from their old apana.org.au subdomains to .net.au domains.
I remember the deregulation and handover to AuDA (I had a lot of calls with Chris Disspain in the lead up period) and I remember the nightmares that errupted regularly before then, CCA’s decision not to join the registrars was probably one of the simplest decisions the Board had ever made.
Anyway, it’s very easy to point the finger at AuDA or AusRegistry, but most of the people mouthing off haven’t seen the other side of that argument; the implementation of it all.
That includes the overly verbose on Whirlpool. That ain’t where decisions are made or policies designed. It’s great for finding specific information to meet a consumer or small business level, but it it ain’t no national or trans-national NOC.
Yeah, I see we overlap a little. Add in the V.C.C.C. nastiness and the first Telecom IPV4 allocation greedy incompetence debacles and I think you might agree a tame do-nothing solution at the top-level country domain is comparatively a blessing. As well as FWIW they have just had another board rewashing. Lots and lots of dirty laundry nobody sane really wants to revisit.
Then there’s the fun and games involved with the periodic tender to see who will run the registry and how. I saw part of the second attempt at that. That is after it had been awarded to AusRegistry in 2000, there was a review and proposal to open it up again. Obviously AusRegistry submitted a proposal and,having done it for several years, it was quite thorough.
I knew the people who assessed all the tender submissions … I won’t say who because chances are it wouldn’t be a one off (although anyone who knows what box2 is would be looking in the right direction), but I happened to visit the office during that review and saw the vast difference in the volume of the AusRegistry proposal compared to all the rest. I am unsurprised that they’ve retained it.