> >If you wouldn't mind telling me how I gain permission to fire up a competing
> >com.au registry any faster than waiting for the promised guidelines to turn
> >up in (I believe) mid January, I'm all ears.
> 
> The .com.au is exclusively delegated to Robert Elz, who I presume is
> reading this (Hi Kre) from the DNS list.  Essentially you have to bow and
> scrape to Robert in order to get the delegation. 

I disagree. As the ISP for dozens of COM.AU domains, I would be
very reluctant to see a complete shake out in the delegation
process or the hosting of COM.AU without a working model.

The object of setting up BIZ.AU is:

a) Provide a working model of competitive registries within a
   single domain;

b) Provide a commercial environment for the development of the
   software required to run these registries;

c) Offer -some- competition to Melbourne IT;

d) Begin to remove the belief that COM.AU is the only place
   for "real" businesses.
   
Simon and I both believed that COM.AU would be a better option.
But I did not (and do not) believe that it would be viable to
just jump in there and say "ok, there's competition now". Having
a working model up and running in the next month or so would
mean that someone else can use our experiences to establish
a competitor to Melbourne IT, in the COM.AU name space.

Hopefully before they screw people into paying for the next year.

Many of the arguments against this have been that there is
no need for it, that it is cosmetically ugly, and that noone
will use it anyway. I don't see this anyone else's problem. If
noone uses it, then the 'net community gets the model for
free, and iiNet and Internode smile sheepishly as we lose money.
But we're betting that people will choose to register with BIZ.AU,
and thereby justifying the production of software for someone else
to compete with MIT in the near future. And we're willing to put
our money and staff behind that belief.

MM