On Sun, 3 Dec 2006, Kim Davies wrote:

 > Quoting James Davis on Monday December 04, 2006:
 > | If you guys recall, several months ago I bought up the issue of the 
 > | wildcards on au.com.au, and com.com.au was causing a lot of issues with 
 > | certain network setups and certain operating systems.
 > 
 > They were previously blocked, but the auDA Names Policy Review Panel in
 > 2004 determined that "the technical basis for maintained the restriction
 > is no longer relevant". I'm not sure what study was performed to come to
 > the conclusion, but their final report reads:
 > 
 >     Recommendation 4: Restriction on domain names that match existing TLDs
 > 
 >     Recommendation 4:
 > 
 >     The Panel recommends that the restriction on domain names that match
 >     existing TLDs be removed. Current policy: The auDA Reserved List
 >     contains existing ccTLDs and gTLDs, which means that people cannot
 >     register two-letter domain names such as "uk", "nz" and "jp", or other
 >     domain names such as "com", "name" and "museum". The basis for reserving
 >     gTLDs and ccTLDs is to comply with IETF standard RFC 1535 (refer to
 >     http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1535.txt?number=1535.)
 > 
 >     Rationale:
 > 
 >     The Panel notes that the technical basis for maintaining the restriction
 >     is no longer relevant due to DNS technology developments since RFC 1535
 >     was drafted over 10 years ago. The Panel further notes that in the
 >     past the restriction has been imposed inconsistently, and hence some
 >     restricted names are in fact being used with no apparent ill effect.
 > 
 > See http://www.auda.org.au/pdf/nprp-final-report.pdf

Well I did, and also nprp-public1.pdf and nprp-public2.pdf, being the
initial and draft reports before that.  Neither sheds more light on the
technical arguments used to deprecate RFC 1535, though the final issues
paper effuses "Given extensive technological developments in the past
decade with respect to DNS resolution and Internet browser software, the
Panel questions whether continued compliance with RFC 1535 is necessary"
without providing any arguments or information to support that notion.

The final consultation paper comes up with the above Rationale, noting
that TWO submissions commented on this issue, one for and one against.

That Panel's recommendations also included 1, 2 or 3 year registration
periods for .au domains, and a merging of the elegibility requirements
for .org.au and .asn.au - neither of which were taken up, were they? 

Cheers, Ian