Australia's .com.au shake-up: New Zealand firms with Australian domains should check their names now
Enom checked a sample of the .com.au names it manages and found about 54% would fail a rule auDA's board has approved in principle. New Zealand businesses that trade into Australia under a brand name should pay attention to that figure.
auDA, which runs Australia's .au domains, plans to scrap the "Close and Substantial Connection" test. Domain Name Wire describes it as the clause that lets people register generic .com.au and .net.au names. Enom says it's the route that allows a domain with a genuine, demonstrable link to a business even when it doesn't match the business's registered name.
According to Enom, that would leave a "Match/Acronym" test. The domain must spell out the registrant's legal or business name, in order, or use its initials. Trading names, brand names and descriptive names are the ones at risk.
IP attorney Erhan Karabardak gave Domain Name Wire two hypothetical cases: Jane's Bakery selling pies at applepies.com.au, and John's Mortgage Broking using mortgagebrokersydney.com.au. He said owners like these would need to register a business name matching the domain or get a trade mark. Many domains, he noted, would be hard to trade mark.
Nothing is final. auDA's website says the board approved the Policy Advisory Panel's recommendations in principle in August 2026 and told management to write an implementation plan that takes the impact of the recommendations into account. No changes to the .au Licensing Rules have been finalised. Enom says there's no effective date. Nobody has decided whether the rule would apply only to new registrations or also to existing names at renewal.
The renewal question matters most. If existing names are caught, Enom says, a holder without a matching business name, company name or trade mark may have to register one before renewing. Some domains may not be renewable at all.
Nobody agrees on how many names are affected, and every estimate comes from someone with a stake in the fight. Enom sampled 1,000 of its own .com.au registrations and read the rule as generously as it could. About 54% failed. David Warmuz, chief executive of Trillion, told Domain Name Wire his company had confirmed "well over one million" affected domains, and that the number could be over two million. A Change.org petition created on 20 September goes furthest. It says about 2.7 million of 3.4 million .com.au and .net.au names, or 80%, will need changes to stay eligible for renewal. It also puts the cost to Australian businesses at more than A$500 million up front and over A$200 million a year.
For scale, Domain Name Wire counted 3.3 million .com.au and about 200,000 .net.au registrations as of July. Enom's is the only estimate of the three that says how it was worked out.
New Zealand companies and agencies holding .com.au names for trans-Tasman trade are squarely exposed. Plenty of those names were registered under a brand or trading name rather than the company's legal name. Overseas companies without an Australian company registration have typically qualified for .au on the strength of an Australian registered trade mark.
Enom, Karabardak and the petition all point to the same fix: an Australian business name registered with ASIC, or a trade mark from IP Australia. Enom treats a matching trade mark as one way to meet the test and renew, though its wording is hedged and its description of Match/Acronym mentions only legal and business names. auDA's pages on the decision don't mention trade marks. Anyone relying on a trade mark should get a straight answer from their registrar or auDA before assuming it covers them.
The petition names GoDaddy, VentraIP, Webcentral, Help.com.au and CrazyDomains as registrars that would face large volumes of change-of-registrant requests. CrazyDomains also sells to New Zealand customers. The petition's own page, which links to an eligibility checker at help.com.au, showed 1,399 signatures.
Enom wants existing names left alone. It has shared its data with auDA, asked it to reconsider and urged grandfathering, so that existing registrations are judged under the rules they were registered under. Domain Name Wire says that at a minimum a grandfathering rule "seems wise".
Karabardak's criticism is sharper. He told Domain Name Wire the Panel was worried about monetisation and speculative registration, and that its report doesn't put a number on the harm the clause is supposed to cause. Yet the Panel's first recommendation, which the board also approved, is to keep allowing .au names to be monetised.
In practice, a business owner should pull a list of every .com.au and .net.au name the business holds, note who is listed as the registrant, and check whether each name spells out that registrant's legal or business name or its initials. The names that fail are the ones to price up for a business name or trade mark. Check renewal dates too, because renewal is when a retrospective rule would bite. Nothing needs buying until auDA publishes its implementation plan. Most of the checking can be done now, though.
Also from 1 October
auDA's statements page says the wholesale price of a .au domain goes from AUD$8.64 to AUD$9.50 a year, ex GST, from 00:00 UTC on 1 October 2026. That's a rise of about 10%. Registrars set their own retail prices and will decide whether to pass it on. The same day, auDA starts a Quality Performance Index programme for its accredited registrars.