May 12, 2014
Here's some more trivia relating to the .AU domain extension.
In a CSIRO blog post, 27 Things You Didn't Know About CSIRO, it states:
"We were the first Australian organisation to start using the internet, which is why we were able to register the second-level domain csiro.au for our website (as opposed to csiro.org.au or csiro.com.au)."
Additionally, .CSIRO.AU is the only second level domain (2LD) in the .AU space allocated to a single entity - the other second level TLD's such as .GOV.AU and .COM.AU are used in connection with multiple parties.
Australia also has Community Geographic Domain Names (CGDNs); reserved for use by community groups with only Australian geographic names such as nsw.au and vic.au allowed in registration.
There are also a handful of second level .AU domains no longer accepting new registrations or that have been deleted altogether; these include: .archie.au, .conf.au, .gw.au, info.au, .otc.au, .oz.au and .telememo.au.
As mentioned in a previous post, .AU is not the only TLD assigned to Australia; there's also .cx, .cc, .hm and .nf.
The growth of .AU during the early years, like many registries, was a difficult period. After a lengthy process in the 1990s, a self-regulatory body called .au Domain Administration (auDA) was created in 1999 to operate the .AU Top Level Domain.
In 2002, AusRegistry was awarded the contract to design, develop and implement a Registry System and associated infrastructure for the .au Domain Administration. AusRegistry remains the Registry Operator today and also operates the .au primary name server while auDA acts as the overseeing body.
The number of .AU registrations has grown from just over 270,000 in 2002 to 2,820,959 at the time of writing.
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