In August 2026 the auDA board approved, in principle, deleting subparagraph (f) from clause 2.4.4(2) of the .au Licensing Rules. One sentence gone, and it lands almost entirely on the people least able to absorb it.
What (f) does
To hold a .com.au you have to show a connection to the name. Pathways (a) to (e) are name matching: the domain matches your registered company, business, personal, partnership or trust name, or your trade mark. (f) is the other one, and it's the sensible one: the domain relates to a service you provide, goods you sell, an event you run, or premises you operate.
Recommendation 2 kills (f).
Who actually wears it
Not the big end of town. They have legal teams, trade marks, and a company name that matches their brand. They're fine.
It's the plumber trading under his own name whose site is a service keyword. The cafe that registered the name of the shop instead of the company behind it. The couple who bought a small business and kept the domain. The bloke with the same address on his van for fifteen years.
Those people keep what they already own by going to ASIC, registering a business name that matches the domain, and lodging a change of registrant. A shell registration that will never trade, never invoice, never employ anyone, renewed forever, purely to satisfy a rule that didn't exist when they registered. One per domain that doesn't match.
Estimates run from 1 million to 2.7 million domains caught, out of roughly 3.4 million. auDA hasn't published its own number. Most of those owners are running a business, not reading policy PDFs, and will find out when a renewal fails.
Why it gets worse
Recommendation 5.2 broadens who can lodge complaints against a domain. WHOIS is public. Once a huge slice of the namespace is non compliant on paper, anyone can go hunting, and the ones picked off are the ones without a lawyer on retainer.
No grandfathering announced. A minority of the Panel opposed this outright. And not one piece of evidence has been published showing (f) was causing harm to anybody. It makes the rules tidier. That's the reason. Tidier rules, and thousands of small operators pay for it.
It's not final, and that's the point
Approved in principle only. auDA still has to draft the rules and consult before the board locks it in. Right now they are working out whether anyone cares.
Sign the petition: https://c.org/rsThXQcsZb
Thirty seconds. Signatures are the only countable thing here, the one number a board can't wave off as a few noisy domainers.
Own one .com.au? Sign it. Own two hundred? Sign it. Own none, but think a small business shouldn't buy a shell registration to keep the address painted on their own shopfront? Sign it, then send it to someone who's about to get caught and has no idea.
Source: r/Domains · by /u/jamesvella007