Consultation on proposed updates to the WHOIS Policy
Under our Terms of Endorsement from the Australian Government, auDA is required to ensure a stable, secure and reliable operation of the .au domain and administer a licensing regime for .au domain names based in multi-stakeholder processes.
We do this by adopting relevant technical standards and developing supporting policies for the .au domain with a multi-stakeholder approach.
WHOIS Policy update
The WHOIS policy sets out the principles, collection, disclosure and use of WHOIS data in the .au domain. This policy requires an update to document a third technical interface available for accessing registration data through a contemporary technical standard developed by the Internet Engineering Taskforce. The standard provides greater consistency, security and interoperability across registries and registrars that manage domain names and internet number resources.
Further detail is contained in the accompanying Explanatory Statement.
Have your say
auDA conducted public consultation for the WHOIS Policy Update from Monday 15 December 2025 to Friday 23 January 2026.
Submissions for this consultation have now closed.
Submissions
No submissions were received.
Outcome
Following the consultation period, the auDA Board reviewed and approved the revised WHOIS Policy 2025-11 at its meeting on 5 February 2026. Key changes to the policy include:
- Adding references to the new RDAP interface and the relevant licensing rules reference
- Specifying the Australian privacy legislation
- Inclusion of .au direct(e.g. forexample.au) as a new namespace
- Replacing the original method of Image Verification Check (IVC) with the more modern reCAPTCHA.
The updated policy can be viewed below: