Big news for website geeks. We can now have .au domains without the .com!
auDA the regulating body for .au domains announced that .au domains will be available for registration from 24 March 2022. That’s right, without the .com bit. Will we change our website to startcreative.au? Will you change yours?
If you have the corresponding .com.au domain, you’ll have priority allocation for 6 months. But after that, anybody can register your corresponding .au domain.
Not much information is known about this new change, but costs should be the same as a traditional .com.au domain, around $15 per year.
What if two different parties each own a net.au and com.au domain? This is called a contested name. Priority will go to the party who registered their domain before 4 February 2018. If both parties registered their domains before then, it unfortunately comes down to a private negotiation between the parties. Weird rules, but we don’t set them! It goes into a stalemate indefinitely until someone withdraws their request or forgets to pay their bill.
What do I think? Is it worth it? Well, .au won’t replace .com.au for a long time. But we certainly expect many new businesses and startups in the next few years to be using the shorter .au domain.
For the rest of us, it’s definitely worth it to register it and park it, for just a few dollars a year and a registration process that takes minutes to do. And then setup a redirect to your main website.
Let us know if you need help with this or any other domain/website queries.
Read more about it on auDA’s website: https://www.auda.org.au/statement/australias-internet-domain-growing-get-ready-getyourau
