From: Brad Driver 
Sent: Saturday, 17 July 2004 10:34 PM
To: jo.lim@auda.org.au
Subject: Review of restriction on geographic names in com.au and net.au

Hi Jo,
 
I’d like to see the restriction on geographic names removed – or at least relaxed.

My name is Brad Driver and I’m a self-employed IT contractor. Under the current policy, 
I am unable to register driver.com.au - my surname, also part of my registered business 
entity name - due to the current geographic name restriction that is in place.

After some research I discovered that “Driver” is the name of a suburb (Postcode 0803) 
situated near Darwin in the Northern Tertiary, thus being protected under the geographic 
names policy.  

I find it unfortunate that suburb names fall under the restriction. Whilst having 
restrictions to protect larger, well known town and city names is probably a good idea, 
it has to be questioned how suitable it is to be including every single suburb name 
within the Australia. 

Why should there be a restriction on suburb names when the vast majority of people would 
have no idea it’s an actual locality in the first place? At a country level and globally, 
people reference localities by the names of major cities and towns, not individual suburb 
names. For this reason, I believe there is little benefit of protecting suburb names under 
the current geographic name restrictions. 

Perhaps a win-win solution would be to say if a localities name appears on a “state-wide” 
level map it should be included under the geographic names restriction. Otherwise no 
restrictions should be applied to the name, since it’s not “on the map” as to speak. This 
way I believe the valuable names of cities, towns and other well known locations could be 
protected, whilst excluding the hundreds of locality names that are of little significance 
to the vast majority of people.

I look forward to hearing the outcome.

Regards

Brad Driver