] mark.hughes words of wisdom were:
] 
] >So what do we do?  Have one commercial 2LD, first in best dressed,
] >and latecomers accept that their domain name won't look like their
] >normal business name?  Or have .com.au and .biz.au and as many
] >others as people want as well?

I would have thought that most companies would use something like the
following algorithm at the moment for registering a domain.

1. Request company-name.com.au.  (The preferred format.)
2. If that is taken, try an abbreviation/expansion/variation of the
   company name in com.au.
3. If that doesn't work, request company-name.net.au.
4. If that is not available, try to negotiate with the current holder
   of company-name.com.au and see if they are prepared to give it up.

(I am assuming that the registrant understands the rules for com.au.)

I suspect that in Australia, the number of cases that would get to
step 4 would be very small.  This is because our population is small
compared to USA or the Internet-connected world; and because we have
a policy in com.au that says you can only get a domain name if you
have a connection to that name.

Does anybody know how small this number is in Australia?

If you create a new 2LD under .au, whose main purpose is to handle
name clashes, then it is likely to be under utilised.  If it is not
widely known and used, then companies are likely to avoid using it,
because the naughty people that use DNS as a search engine (ie: the
company's potential customers) aren't likely to try a strange domain
unless they have seen other companies use it.

In short, unless a new 2LD can acheive a critical mass, most pragmatic
companies are more likely to stay within com.au (even if they have
to accept a sub-optimal variation on their name in some cases).

Of course, this analysis may no longer be applicable if there was
a significant price difference between 2LDs or similar reason for
companies to flock towards a new 2LD, apart from name availability.
__________________________________________________________________________
David Keegel <djk&#167;cyber.com.au>  http://www.cyber.com.au/  +61 3 9642-5997
Cybersource P/L: Unix Systems Administration and TCP/IP network management