Domainers get a victory in Australia.
Australian domain name registry manager auDA will continue to permit domain investing in the .AU namespace.
The decision comes after its Policy Review Panel suggested a change that would effectively halt domain investing.
Current rules prohibit registering a domain for the “sole purpose” of selling or transferring it to another entity. The proposal would have changed that to the “primary purpose”, effectively closing a loophole.
But auDA management didn’t follow the suggestion.
It said that the provision would target domain investors:
The warehousing prohibition appears to disproportionately target domain investors as the licence portfolios or holdings of trademark and brand owners will be excluded under the PRP proposal. This proposal elevates the rights of trademark and other intellectual property owners over other licence holders in the .au domain, which may give rise to issues of market power and anti-competitive practices. Management believes that further information is required to assess whether the net benefit to the community of prohibiting warehousing in respect of a class of registrants outweighs the competition issues. For these reasons Management believes that there should be no change to the existing policy position.
It also noted:
The proposed test for determining whether a registrant has contravened the resale and warehousing prohibition will increase compliance costs for registrants and administration, monitoring and enforcement costs for auDA. These costs may be disproportionate to the risk or severity of the harm to the community from warehousing and the cost of a licence in the .au domain.
Internet Commerce Association was among the groups opposed to the proposal. I imagine that Afilias, which took over backend operations for .AU last year, also rallied the troops.
“for the “sole purpose” of selling or transferring it to another entity.”
My first thought is, how is this different than investing in a corporation by buying shares? How many public companies would I invest in, if I could not sell or transfer my corporate shares?
How many TLDs would exist today if domain investors were not investing in them during the early years?
My attitude has always been, if they don’t want me, I will put my money elsewhere.
Technology is advancing at such a rapid pace opening new opportunities for those who follow it closely, There are more opportunities on the net today than there were in the 1990’ – Gene Downs
I have a feeling this generic/spam comment was posted to increase someone’s backlink profile.
All links in comments are nofollow, FYI
The whole concept of policing the purpose of domain names is silly. Ban the for-sale registrations and people will start putting up lame websites claiming they have a “project” with that domain. Then what? Judging whether a project is legitimate or not, demanding financial audit or something?
You are of course correct. However, I was looking forward to the fun & games these proposed rules invited.
Other things “you can’t sell” include IPv4 address blocks, Twitter and Facebook accounts, etc., all of which are regularly sold.
Not sure how you prevent domain investing, but as an ocossional purchaser of domain names for specific projects, discovering that the ones you want are dormant with the cynical owner demanding a 100x return on their investment is a genuine annoyance. Domain investors are the ambulance chasers of the IT world
Negotiate a fairer price, and consider there are bigger fish in the sea the owner is waiting for. Sometimes I need to remind a buyer that had I sold the domain for the price they’re asking they wouldn’t have the opportunity to consider purchasing it as it would have sold already. Otherwise they are trying to steal or claim an asset which I have a right to control and manage how I want.
Would you rather someone else bought an undervalued asset and took it off the market forever, or that the investor saw to it that the domain went to you who had the best use case? Therefore it would sell to the end user who could get the most value from their investment to match the big effort or resources put in to develop the project or business into something noteworthy.
Maybe your grandma has some land she could sell me for $5000 that her forefathers paid $100 for long ago? I don’t care if the land could achieve for $500,000 on the market now or tomorrow, I demand she sell it to me for what I feel is fair. What is she, an ambulance chaser of the real estate world?
Surely you meant to say that Domain Investors are the crossing guards of IT.
If one could get any prestigious domain one wanted, for one’s sundry ‘specific projects,’ our courts and cops would be drowning in fraud complaints.
If one can’t be arsed to learn how to spell, one likely can’t be arsed to learn how to erect a firewall, run QA, etc. Hobbyists have infinite TLD options…they don’t need to use the ‘global commercial suffix,’ and they don’t need blue-chip dotcoms. By contrast, serious companies do. And when they ask consumers to trust them with their data and dollars, they put skin in the game.
They usually don’t lose that investment, because desirable dotcoms only appreciate. So everybody online wins. Except entitled dilettantes.