.au
 | |
| Industry: | TLD |
| Founded: | 1986 |
| Headquarters: | 114 Cardigan Street, Carlton VIC 3053 |
| Country: | Australia |
| Website: | http://www.auda.org.au |
| Key People | |
| Chris Disspain, CEO Adam King, Technical Officer | |
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.au is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) name for Australia managed and operated by .au Domain Administration (auDA). a not-for-profit policy authority and self-regulatory body endorsed by the Australian government. The.au ccTLD is one of the top 10 largest country codes in world with more 2 million registered domain names as of March 2011.
Background
In 1986, the .au ccTLD was established and it was delegated by the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) to Kevin Robert Elz, a network program from the University of Melbourne. He served as the manager of .au ccTLD selflessly as volunteer. During his management the use of Australian domain increased and in order to meet the strong demands for convenient names under the .au cc TLD, eleven second-level domains were created such as:asn.au,com.au, conf.au, csiro.au, edu.au, gov.au, id.au, info.au, net.au, org.au, and oz.au.[1]
Establishment of auDA
In 1997, the internet community in Australia realized that Mr. Elz could no longer handle the management of the growing .au cc TLD alone and formed the Australian Domain Name Administration (ADNA), a private self-regulatory body to ensure the efficient operation of the Australian domain name. However,the organization again accepted the fact that they do not have the necessary power to effectively operate and be accountable to the local internet community. ADNA and the local internet community approached the Australian Commonwealth government through the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE) to help them establish a more effective self-regulatory body to oversee Australia's internet industry domain space.[2]
The Australian government agreed to assist ADNA and conducted consultative process to address key issues to develop a comprehensive mechanism to ensure the effective oversight and administration of the .au TLD in 1999. The consultation process was led by Greg Crew, who was the initial Director of ICANN at that time. The Australian Domain Administration (auDA), a new non-profit organization was formed. Mr. Elz was subsequently assigned to manage the .com.au name space on November 15, 1999.[3]
auDA was officially established on December 2000 through the endorsement of the Australian government'[4]
.au Registry
AusRegistry Pty Ltd. was authorized by auDA to operate the open 2LDs which include com.au, .net.au, .id.au, .asn.au and .org.au as well as the government (.gov.au) and education (.edu.au) domain names until 2014.[5]The .au registry is composed of a database of domain names registered in each 2LD and a public WHOIS service.
auDA and ICANN
In 2001, ICANN re-delegated the .au cc TLD to auDA. Mr. Chris Disspain, CEO of auDA served as Chairman of ICANN's country code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) since 2003 when the organization was formed to represent the interest and to develop global policies and carry out best practices for country code top level domains like .au, .uk and .de. In 2010, Mr. Disspain was elected as member of the ICANN Board. [6]