>
>Neither of the proposers are on the eastern seaboard. 

Welcome to the Internet, where your physical location isn't a disadvantage,
right?

>I don't see that as a
>problem in itself, but it might be sensible to ensure there was a well 
>connected secondary for the domain outside of SA/WA. Does that have to be
>reflected in a policy statement for domains? I doubt it, although its similar
>to requiring a DNA to be connected to more than one ISP or backbone-class
>provider.

It's a good point, and I don't think it has to be in the policy statement
for the domains (personally) though I wouldn't really care if it was. It's
relatively straightforward to set up secondaries, and I would suspect that
the "big three" national providers would all be prepared to run a secondary
for their own purposes anyway. 

I don't think there is any huge problem with intra-australian connectivity
for providers as close to the "middle" of the national structures involved
as Internode and iiNet are. We both run multiple BGP peered links to
multiple national providers. That's not a bad start!

>
>Don't you run the same risk com.au does in promoting state level business
>registration to "peer" with national/ASX forms in causing namespace collision?
>

I don't (personally) like state based registrations for *companies*. Note
that in the USA, for instance, the ".us" namespace is subdivided
geographically into state and city (for nstance, asylum.sf.ca.us), and is
generally for non-commercial use in practical terms ("home" systems etc)
with most of the commercial "stuff" tending to happen in .NET and .COM.

I, for one, if I had a business in state "x", might well NOT want to have my
state name locked into the domain name, as this might somewhat cramp one's
style when opening an office in another state (where the domain name might
or might not still be available). SO what would one do? Register the name in
all state subdomains - and hence defeat the purpose, they might as well have
found a suitable, free, name in ".com.au".

Simon
---
Simon Hackett, Technical Director, Internode Systems Pty Ltd
31 York St [PO Box 284, Rundle Mall], Adelaide, SA 5000 Australia
Email: simon§internode.com.au  Web: http://www.on.net
Phone: +61-8-8223-2999          Fax: +61-8-8223-1777