While I was looking at changing my domain from .org to .au, I believe that I looked at the wikipedia page for .au domains on that page it has a small like of second level domains(2LDs). It’s a shortish list that seemed quite reasonable. It includes the usual .net.au and .com.au and the unusual .id.au and the .asn.au. These are both “public” registerable domains that “anyone” register, as long as you are an australian individual and citizen or an incorporated australian association. While it also included three private domain names: .gov.au .edu.au and .csiro.au. Now I get this seems normal and fine. But if I had scrolled a little further down the page, I would have seen the odd ones.
So funnily enough people dont really like having odd TLDs or 2LDs, so much so that according to the auDA’s monthly report we have 3,186,859 .com.au’s and unsurprisingly the “unusual 2LDs” so thats .id.au and .asn.au have alot less registrations with 11,985 and 2,686 registrations respectively. So unsurprisingly, when you create 8 new 2LDs that people dont really know about and dont actually advertise it you dont get many registrants. these 8 2LDs had 212 registrants in 2018, and I’m under the impression that this number has only gone down. Or it hasn’t? in June of 2016 there were 199 registered for these 2LDs. I’d love to get a number on these domains, but I cannot find one in the auDA monthly reports.
A Community Geographic Domain Name or CGDN is a Domain name registered for a geographic community. For example if I lived in Koonwarra(I dont but this is the example I saw used alot) and I wanted to create to website for the community there then I woudld need a suitible domain name, now I could go for the widely known and internet associated .com or the less popular .net. I could go for an australian domain like .au .com.au .net.au or even an .asn.au. But the auDA just created 8 new community domains and Koonwarra is eligable for koonwarra.vic.au.
The 2LDs that the auDAs made are:
With one for each state/major territory.
That would be a great question, IF ONLY I HAD ANSWERS. I genuinly emailed an email I found and that redirected too another email which responded and they never responded to my followup email, am I butt hurt? a little. but I have lost interest in finding out. I last edited this blogpost a month ago and I have completely forgotten the direction I was taking this article. So i have decided t ojust publish it and see how it goes. I do think that this is a neat idea but I think it was a rather techy process targetted to the tech illiterate. Heck most nerds dont care about domain names and probably dont care about setting up a website for their community. I found out that my town had a website that was setup after Black Saturday. I then found out that this website was shut down 2 years later becuase no one wanted to maintain it.
and I think most people thought the same.