The .AU Priority Renewals Have Been Updated

Following my article “auDA Has Dropped The Ball With Regards .AU”, the renewals were processed on Saturday.

I was advised of this by email from Bruce Tonkin of auDA late Saturday. Thank you Bruce.

Coincidental or not, that is at last great news for those registrants that have been expecting this to happen nearly a month ago.

However, there is a lot of concern being expressed by some registrants that certain parties were given extensions of time to pay their renewal fees.

If this is the case, then I think auDA have themselves a problem. e.g. If i was able to determine that one of my applications wasn’t granted because of this possible latitude, I believe I would have a legitimate claim for compensation (because I complied with their rules / policies and paid by the required date).

If you want to check your results, here is the tool.

So what happens next year?

There are already hints that auDA is considering changes to the current priority allocation system. Why? Because it is not working as well as they hoped it would.

I’m not sure how they do that without affecting the presumptive rights of all existing priority token holders?

This was a major consideration discussed at the Policy Review Panel back in 2017. I was initially a panel member, and I remember raising this as a problem then. It was suggested that if a priority conflict could not be resolved in the 5 year period, then the subject domain would be “locked” permanently. This seemed the fairest solution at the time.

Assuming that the process stays the same for next year, then at the very least, auDA must enforce deadlines. Secondly, systems should be in place to award allocations within 72 hours of the payment deadline.

Did you get allocated any priority domains?

I would be interested to hear if any of our readers were able to acquire any of their priority applications?

We were successful with eight of our applications, and unsuccessful with a whole lot more! Oh well, more money for auDA’s cash cow!

Two nice ones we got were Scooter.au and Guitars.au. In both these instances, we had tried to resolve the conflict ourselves by offering an amount of money to get them to withdraw their application – or the same amount to withdraw ours. They both declined at the time, but yet didn’t renew this year. That’s a win for us!

If you want to join the conversation, you can do so here on LinkedIn.