Australia’s Own ccTLD Not Good Enough for auDA!

Apparently Australia’s ccTLD isn’t good enough for auDA, the .au policy and regulatory body. In advertisements in daily papers promoting a series of seminars on “the biggest changes in 30 years” to .au, auDA deemed it better to use .ly domain name than .au!

The series of advertisements with the, well, let’s be polite, snafu, comes some weeks after auDA’s Marketing and Research Coordinator either jumped or was pushed and the organisation appears to have engaged consultants rather than employ a dedicated person to deal with marketing and communications. [Update: Apparently auDA has now employed a new marketing and communications person]

The advertisements, see below for the Melbourne one, were published in newspapers around the country, this one published in the Herald Sun. The seminars are being held in February in Perth, Sydney (both already held), Melbourne and Brisbane.

So yes, while .ly is a recognised URL shortener, surely using auda.org.au/auMELBO would have been better than bit.ly/auMELBO to take one to the Eventbrite registration form for the Melbourne seminar? And from a usability perspective, including both upper and lower case letters in a URL isn’t wise either. And why http:// and not www.? As the policy and regulatory body maybe they could have used something like aupolicyreform.org.au/mel?

According to the registration form, the 6-hour seminar, including a one-hour lunch break, will:

• inform stakeholders on the progress of the review and to invite feedback from stakeholders on issues such as:
• Who should be entitled to hold an Australian domain name licence
• What eligibility requirements should exist in relation to each type of Australian domain name
• Should any terms be prohibited from being used as an Australian domain name
• How .au direct registration should be implemented (that is, domain registration at the second level, such as example.au)
• Consumer protection, fair trading and the .au domain space
• What is and is not working at present in relation to Australian domain names
• A discussion paper will soon be released examining the issues around a new registrant policy.