The Fight For .au
from the who-owns-what-now? dept
Wired has an interesting article about the struggle for who gets to control the domain naming rights down under. Since 1986 Robert Elz has been in control (thanks to Jon Postel). Since the death of Postel and the rise of ICANN, domain control has been passing into the control of private companies. In Australia that company is auDA. Elz gave up control of dot-com.au without any issue, but said that auDA wasn’t ready for other .au domains… so ICANN just took them from him. People are pissed off, saying it’s yet another example of ICANN simply flexing their power without giving any thought to what they were actually doing.
