> I have been unable to see whether anyone agrees in theory with
>the possibilty of IP Australia taking over  the administration of our
>dearly beloved "dot com dot au "

IP Australia is a poor 'fit' with the users of the com.au domain namespace.

I seem to remember Ross Wilson of IP Australia telling me a year or two ago
that there were about 250,000 trademarks registered in Australia.   Since
many entities have multiple trademarks, the number of different entities
represented is much less.

There are over 2 million entities today eligible for a com.au domain name
(any entity with a company name, business name, ABN, etc).  The vast
majority of those entities don't have and never will have registered
trademarks or any formal interaction with IP Australia.

There's also a difference in objective.  Holders of trademarks, patents,
etc, tend to spend a fair amount of energy pursuing restrictions of various
sorts - especially the large multinationals.  Trademark law gives trademark
holders only limited rights (e.g. McDonalds Restaurants can't stop McDonalds
Electricians from operating, nor can they stop thousands or millions of
Scottish people using the surname McDonald).  But on a world scale, the WIPO
and the country IP organisations have spent a fair amount of energy trying
to get complete veto power over domain names - i.e. to get in the domain
namespace a level of control that they don't have in the rest of the world.

The internet has gone from being viewed as military thing (70's), to an
education thing (80's) to a business thing (90's) and  is likely to move on
to being a people thing, and the growth area for domain names will be for
individuals - why shouldn't 19 million Australians have .au domain names if
they want to?

Treating domain names as primarily an issue for business is wrong; treating
it as primarily an issue for trademark & patent holders would be an even
bigger mistake - their interests are not the same as 2,000,000 Australian
commercial entities.

Regards, Mark

Mark Hughes
Effective Business Applications Pty Ltd
effectivebusiness§pplications.com.au
www.pplications.com.au
61 4 1374 3959






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