Hi James,

Quoting James Davis on Monday July 24, 2006:
| 
| I'm not sure if many of you have noticed, although I'm sure many have.
| Recently Auda lifted the ban on registering a domain names that matches
| existing top-level domain names. 
| 
| as many LARGE companies do, they generally have the following
| settings on there SOE or in GPO
| srchlist=local.foo.com.au/foo.com.au/com.au (even without this setting,
| certain settings on the network interface cause the same behaviour.
| 
| And finally, who in their right mind at auda, allowed this policy to be
| passed.. It's idiotic.
| 
| I welcome anyone's opinions, and to find out if anyone else has seen the
| above behaviour, and if there's anything we can do to petition Auda to
| actually consider third party applications before they do something like
| this.

The reason policies like this existed was exactly to prevent against
this problem. It was indeed prevalent about 10 years ago to perform
suffix searches in the resolver, and to whack in things like ".com.au",
".com" and ".au" in there.

I argued against removing the restriction on the auDA Board because,
even though anecdotally very few do this any more, I didn't see a
compelling reason to release them when the risk still existed. The first
time it was raised was in 2001, when I explained why the restriction was
there, and the matter was dropped. It was raised again last year, and
some others argued the problem didn't exist at all, but couldn't support
this with any research as I recall.

To be fair, almost every other TLD registry that had the same
restriction has removed it, so auDA is one of the last places that had
it existing.

Whilst I don't really agree with the removal of the restriction, I think
what this really highlights is the lack of a suitable mechanism for the
operators who would be affected by the change to be advised in advance.
Presumably just sticking it on auDA's webpage is not enough, and it is
not clear to me what education campaign might have been conducted to
explain to corporate enterprises they need to correct these kind of
configurations.

kim