Preparing The New Regime
The inaugural board of the new organisation was elected in April 1999, and began the task of trying to help mould a new framework for the .au industry.
It began by signing memoranda of understanding with the existing registry operators, providing seed funding that allowed it to commence full-time operations and hire staff.
As part of the process, the organisation was required to obtain a reassignment of .au from ICANN. As part of this process, it was controversially required to sign a contract with the organisation - the first such country to do so.
auDA's structure saw that all major policies, such as how domains are allocated or how the industry was structure, was given to ad-hoc policy development panels. These panels called upon experts from all related fields to sift through public comment and devise policies. The auDA board was left to ensure that these panels followed due process, and that their conclusions were sound.
The key panels of auDA that shaped the current .au landscape is the Name Policy Panel of 2000, and the Competition Panel of 2000. The latter concluded that the .au space should be as open as possible, with competition at both the domain name registry and the domain name registrar levels. The Name Policy Panel saw naming policy remain mostly unchanged, with the exception of the .id.au sub-domain which was liberalised.
Resulting from the call from competition, the operation of 5 key .au registries - .com.au, .net.au, .org.au, .asn.au and .id.au was put to tender. The winning bidder(s) were to operate the registry for four years. One bid, encompassing all five registries, from AusRegistry won.
Read more about this topic: .au Domain Administration
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