auDA approved a major .com.au eligibility change — here's what actually happened
In August 2026, the auDA Board — the body that administers Australia's .au namespace — approved in principle a Policy Advisory Panel recommendation to delete subparagraph (f) from section 2.4.4(2) of the .au Licensing Rules, and directed auDA management to prepare an implementation plan. The decision became the subject of wider domain industry coverage in early September, once outlets outside Australia picked it up — coverage that has called it, without much exaggeration, one of the most disruptive ccTLD policy shifts in years.
What the rule actually did
For 25 years, Australian .com.au and .net.au registrations could rely on what's known as the "close and substantial connection" test. In plain terms: you didn't need a matching business name or trademark to register a domain — you just had to show the name was connected to goods, services, an event, an activity, or premises you were involved with. A bakery could register a domain describing what it sells. A school could register a domain for its fundraising drive. A mortgage broker could register a generic, descriptive term relevant to their work — all without first registering a business name that matched the domain exactly.
That flexibility is what's being removed. Under the approved change, registrants will instead need to qualify through one of the remaining name-based pathways: a matching company or business name, a related entity, a partnership or trust, or an Australian trademark.
The scale of it
.com.au and .net.au together account for roughly 3.5 million domain registrations — by far the bulk of the .au namespace. Industry estimates reported by Domain Name Wire put the number of registrations that could fail the new test at over one million, with some estimates running as high as 2.5 million. That's not a rounding error — it's a meaningful fraction of every .com.au domain in existence today.
The Internet Commerce Association (ICA), an industry advocacy group, has been the loudest formal objector. Their analysis notes that even the cheapest compliance path — registering a matching Australian business name at roughly $47/year — could add more than $47 million a year in ongoing costs across the affected registrant base, before counting trademark filing fees for registrants who can't or don't want to register a business name.
It wasn't even a clean vote
This is the detail that gets lost in the more alarmist coverage: the underlying policy panel wasn't unanimous. Of seven panel members, only four voted to delete the rule. Two voted against it, and a third abstained — but later publicly sided with the minority, including a former auDA Chair. In other words, a decision affecting millions of small businesses and community organizations passed on a narrow, contested vote, not an industry-wide consensus that the old rule was broken.
The case for the change — and the case against it
auDA hasn't published a detailed, formal cost-benefit rationale alongside the decision. The informal read from industry commentary is that the panel wanted to curb a specific practice: using the "close and substantial connection" test to register generic, high-value descriptive domains purely to monetize them with advertising, rather than to run an actual identifiable business — tightening the link between a legal entity and the domain it holds.
The ICA's counter-argument is worth taking seriously on its own terms, independent of who's "right": they point out the panel's own logic is inconsistent (domain monetization itself remains completely legal under the new rules — only this particular registration pathway to it is being removed), that no formal harm analysis or cost estimate was published before the vote, and that there is, as of this decision, no grandfathering plan for the businesses, schools and clubs that registered names in good faith under rules that stood unchanged for a quarter of a century.
What happens next
Nothing has actually changed for existing registrants yet. auDA's own process requires the board to develop an implementation plan — considering exactly this kind of registrant impact — before drafting the formal Licensing Rules amendment that would bring the change into force. The ICA's explicit recommendation is that if the deletion proceeds at all, it should apply only to new registrations going forward, with every existing compliant domain protected indefinitely, including through renewal and transfer, plus direct notice to affected registrants before any enforcement begins. Whether auDA adopts that position, some middle ground, or moves ahead as originally voted is still an open question.
Why this matters beyond Australia
It's tempting to read this as a narrow, local story about one country's registry policy. It isn't, really. It's a sharp illustration of a risk that applies to every country-code domain, not just .au: a ccTLD's eligibility rules are not a fixed feature of the extension — they're a policy decision made by whichever body administers that namespace, and that body can and does revise the rules retroactively, sometimes on a narrow vote, sometimes after consultation processes that still leave major parts of the affected community dissatisfied.
We've made a version of this point before when covering .it domain eligibility — registration there already requires EU/EEA residency or a registered business presence, a rule that could itself be tightened or loosened without much warning. The .com.au situation just shows the other side of the same coin: rules can also be tightened after you've already built a business around a domain, not just before you register one.
The practical takeaway if you hold or are considering a ccTLD: know exactly which eligibility pathway your registration currently relies on, keep the underlying qualification (business name, trademark, residency, whatever it is) active and matching, and don't assume that because a rule has stood for years — or even decades — it's guaranteed to stay that way. If you register or renew a .com.au or .net.au domain through Irist, this is a policy area worth watching over the coming months as auDA finalizes an implementation timeline — we'll update this if and when enforcement details are confirmed.
Sources: Domain Name Wire, Internet Commerce Association, Domainer.