From: David Guillaume 
Sent: Tuesday, 27 July 2004 1:42 PM
To: jo.lim@auda.org.au
Subject: Review of restriction on geographic names in com.au and net.au 

Hello Jo,
Thank you for the opportunity to respond to this question.
1. Should the restriction on geographic names in com.au and net.au be maintained? If so, 
why? 

Having been involved with the Wollongong OCOS project for some months now I was 
dismayed to hear that it is proposed to market .net.au and .com.au URLs in conjunction with 
geographic names in Australia.

Given that someone had the vision originally to set up OCOS and set aside special 
“geographic URLs” the marketing of additional .net.au & .com.au names seems short-sighted 
and will be the death-knell for current OCOS projects and any proposed ones.

Could I suggest that the OCOS projects are given a year or two to establish themselves so 
that the public gets used to the concept of the domain name structure to find community 
based gateways.

I am sure that somewhere there is a middle ground that will satisfy most, if not all, parties. I 
sympathize with those whose surname is the same as a place name but by the same token 
open slather on .com and .net names also seems inappropriate given the current, justifiable, 
restrictions on the release of these domain names.

Surely no one individual or company owns, or has the exclusive right to a place name.

Regards,

David Guillaume.