Go-live
The new regime of competition and name policy began on July 1, 2002. With relatively few teething problems, and a huge increase in domain registrations, the new environment was hailed a success.
auDA also focuses its work on trying to reduce the ongoing incidence of fraud in domain name registrations. High profile cases have been brought against companies that try to trick consumers into unnecessarily registering domain names, by sending false invoices with unreasonably high prices. It scored a major success in early 2004 when a joint action with the Australian government saw key purveyors of this practice restrained by the federal court.
In mid-2004, there was considerable disruption to the .au space when some legacy domains unexpectedly expired. auDA had been announcing the renewal policy for over two years, but did not succeed in contacting some of the registrants. This resulted in chaos as registrants needed to quickly reinstate their domains when they were switched off.
Read more about this topic: .au Domain Administration