The auDA registry, which manages Australia’s country code domain .AU, has summed up the fiscal year ending in June, the administrator’s annual report being a little less than encouraging. As of June 30, 2020, the total number of domains under auDA management was 3,180,395, down from 3,193,421 a year earlier. The decline can be certainly considered insignificant – less than 1 percent. However, most large domains, primarily country-code domain zones, showed significant growth this past spring as small and medium-sized business activities moved increasingly online due to the COVID-19 restrictions.
The .AU domain also showed growth; according the report, in the three months from April 2020, registrations of new domain names increased by 28 percent over the previous quarter. But even this significant increase was not enough to bring the annual balance even to zero. Many observers believe this is due to the business model used by the Australian domain name administrator. It still does now allow direct registration at the second level of .au – only third-level names such as com.au, net.au, org.au, etc. The introduction of direct registration has been discussed for a few years now, but without any concrete results so far. However, the new auDA report says it will finally present a plan for this reform in the first or second quarter of 2021, according to the Online Domain website.
