Are You Eligible To Hold A .au Domain Name?

In Australia, domain names under the .au namespace are subject to stringent eligibility and allocation rules. Importantly, non-Australian commercial entities are only eligible for registration for an Australian domain if they have applied for or hold an Australian trade mark registration with an exact match to the relevant domain name.

In order to constitute an "exact match", the domain must be identical to one, some or all of the words or numbers of the trade mark. However, punctuation marks, articles such as "a", "the", "and" "or" "of" and ampersands are not included in any comparison.

We have recently observed foreign domain name registrars applying for trade marks on behalf of foreign companies for words with randomly inserted punctuation marks. Once the punctuation marks are removed, the remaining letters correspond exactly with recently filed domain names in the .au space and share the same registrant name as the domain name applicant. Many of these