lot easier to buy and sell domain names.
The AUDA (the Australian Domain
which outlines that as long as what your busi-
ness does or sells has a "close and substantial
connection" to a domain name, you are free
to buy it if its owner is willing to sell it.
red tape for businesses that want to trade do-
main names.
names directly from other businesses who
may not be fully utilising them and also se-
cure a fair value for a domain name that they
themselves are not using," Tonkin says. "Put
in real estate terms there are many vacant
blocks of land that are not being used for any-
thing other than advertising billboards." Not
only does the new policy allow businesses to
gain access to this land and put it to good use,
he says, it also enables them to reinvest any
proceeds from domain name sales back into
their businesses.
hasn't been registered, securing the do-
main name you want will now be a matter
of negotiation.
the hope of selling them later at a profit, this
could be bad news.
to further put the brakes on domain name farm-
ing, any domain name registered for the pur-
poses of earning money from advertising on a
website must only display content related to that
an entity name, personal name or brand name in
existence when it was registered and registering
misspellings of a company or brand name is also
banned when it is a deliberate attempt to trade
on the reputation of another entity's goodwill.
over the past five years. Names such as super-
model.net.au and debtconsolidator.com.au
to its relatively small size (the number of visi-
tors to a .com.au name is between 10 and 100
times lower than an equivalent .com name),
Tonkin predicts we will see a level of interest
he says.