The current legislation (Telecommunications Act 1991 + amendments) is
clear in that numbering of telecommunications services is a duty of Austel.  

It is also pretty clear that IP addrs for the Internet are numbers as
far as the act is concerned.

It is also pretty clear that non-numeric addresses would have been explicitly
included if the people drafting the stuff had thought to.  If the High
Court of Aust was asked to look at this question, I'd put money on them
saying that DNS was another form of numbering.


The new legislation currently in the senate does cover non-numeric addresses.
It says that letters and symbols are taken to be numbers for the purpose
of the numbering of carriage services (which includes Internet links that
are sold to the public.)  It also has a section on the "Regulation of
electronic addressing".  The ACA is obliged to manage the plans for
such things.  They are able to delegate this to a third party if they wish.

Given the current political environment (can you say 'economic rationalism'?)
if there is a vacuum, the ACA would likely try to delegate this to an
'industry body'.  This is based on the view that those with money at stake
have incentive to manage things 'properly'.



i.e.  if we don't organise a body to perform these functions, the ACA will
sooner or later step in and try to get an industry body formed to do so.


See http://www.austlii.edu.au/ for the current legislation and
http://www.dca.gov.au for the draft legislation.