From auDA:

auDA, the .au Domain Administrator, today announced the 1 millionth .au domain name had been registered.

"We are pleased to announce that the 1 millionth .au domain registration is elite-finance.com.au" said Chris Disspain, auDA’s CEO. "We congratulate the Registrant of elite-finance.com.au for being part of this momentous occasion."

Adrian Kinderis, Managing Director of AusRegistry, the Registry Operator and wholesale provider for all commercial and non-commercial .au domain names concurs, "We too offer our congratulations, 1 million .au domains is a huge achievement for the .au namespace and for Australian internet users. It was only 5 years ago the tally was close to 250,000."

You really don’t see the growth in domain names that you see in other countries, especially the US, due to auDA’s very strict registration policies.  This is either a good thing or  a bad thing depending on your perspective.  Doubling in size in 5 years isn’t exactly amazing growth, but given the regulation of the market, it is a positive sign.

I’d like to see some data on the breakdown of those domains, what type of domains (com.au, net.au, org.au, etc.), what’s the actual growth rate & is it increasing or decreasing. That would give us a better picture of how the market is going.

Following from the ICANN meeting today in which they took up the issue of the whois privacy debate. The outcome is, unsurprisingly, motion 2.  Motion 2 is basically the do-nothing option.  It says that there is no consensus and more study is needed.  This after years of study by the ICANN commissioned whois Task force.   I really don’t know what else the expect to find out, this really is just a ‘we don’t want to decide, so lets put it off‘ option.

Comments on the decision:

Thomas Roessler:

In practical terms, this means that the ICANN community’s attempt to come to consensus about WHOIS is over for now. It is pretty clear that there is indeed no WHOIS policy that that community can agree on without a change to the political environment that it is operating in; it is also clear that this is not due to a lack of factual knowledge or background research, but because of deeply divergent views on the issues. Maybe taking time out would help. Nevertheless, the GNSO (and ICANN as a whole) also suffers horror vacui: ICANN is, after all, the organization tasked with coming to consensus about these kinds of issues, and ICANN giving up means a big opening for others to step in.

Wendy Seltzer:

Now, it’s time for the Council to vote. Council’s draft motions.

Motion 1: Approve OPOC as modified, 7 yes, 17 no. fails. The PDP is over. Long live the privacy-sapping WHOIS stalemate. Ross Rader, Registrar rep from Tucows, puts it best: “I do not think we have done the community any favors as a result of this discussion.”

The negotiation-forcing sunset proposal failed on a close vote: 10 yes, 13 no. It would have called for the elimination of WHOIS requirements from contracts in a year if consensus were not reached in the interim.

Instead, the Council called for — wait for it — more study. Don’t hold your breath.

It’s clearly time to go outside ICANN for help on the privacy front. I would like to see someone offer a _true_ privacy-preserving registration service — one that does not merely offer up the domain registrant’s personal information upon request. Any takers?

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The SMH tech section has picked up on an ongoing debate about the whois service & what it should contain.  ICANN was accepting submissions on a new set of proposals on how the whois database should work up until 00:00 UTC 30th Oct 2007 (that was 10:30am AEDST yesterday).

So what’s the actual issue?  Wendy Seltzer has a good run-down on her site:

The specifics of the current debate, apart from the substanceless comments filling the forums, is a proposal to allow domain registrants to substitute an “Operational Point of Contact,” or OPOC, in the public listing. While all their private information would still be collected, it need not be published. Instead, the OPOC would route messages to the right recipient, for operational, technical, or legal inquiries. Thus OPOC would simultaneously make WHOIS a better technical contact resource and improve domain registrants’ privacy options. Even OPOC doesn’t go so far as I would like — I’d allow anonymous registrations, rather than insisting that data be collected if not displayed — but it’s better than the status quo.

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