On Monday, June 22, 1998 12:50 PM, Jean-Christophe Praud[SMTP:jc.praud§ludexpress.com] wrote:
§> The .AU domain contains about 1 host and 11 domains. It has a serial
§> number which implies it hasn't been updated for over a month, and I'd say
§> that would have only been for a change in a conf.au domain (which are stored
§> in the same zone file), and I'm sure the only changes which would have been
§> made in .AU in the past few years would have been NS changes - if any.
§> 
§
§How do you pretend to be active on the Net, with so few names ?
§
§Aren't there any Australian company, or organization, which would want
§to 
§have its site under its .AU name ?
§
§Even if there are far less names in .FR than in .COM, we, in France,
§have lots of .fr names. Owned by french companies (big & small) and
§french subidiaries of foreign companies :
§
§http://www.ibm.fr
§http://www.lotus.fr
§http://www.apple.fr
§http://www.coca-cola.fr
§...
§
§You'd benefit from a .AU zone really competitive...
§

It appears as though they might be following the .US TLD.

If that TLD is taken over by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS)
then more structure might be added that results in very long
names that are directly related to the geographic postal
delivery system.

If this happens, then the .USA domain may become the place
where names like WWW.IBM.FR are created. In the case of
Australia, maybe the .AUS or .AUSTRALIA TLD will become
the place to be.

It looks like the .AU TLD is being encouraged as NOT the
place to be via strict policies. If that is what the people want
then it will likely become a less desirable TLD, like the .US
TLD. In both cases, they will likely become heavily regulated
by the respective governments. That was one of the items
the White Paper process uncovered. Governments finally
became interested once they saw that the U.S. Government
wss interested. Following the US lead appears to be the one
appoach at this point in time.


Jim Fleming
Unir Corporation - http://www.unir.com - 0:196 .MALL
1998 - The Year of the C+§