THE REPORT

Australian Domain Registrations

• Australia mirrors global growth of ccTLD's at 28 percent
• Australia domain registrations, 1.8% of the worldwide market

Overview

NetRegistry would like to acknowledge AusRegistry and auDA as the source of the following data. Their roles in the industry are as follows. auDA is the Australian domain name administrator and AusRegistry is the registry operator for .au second level domains. From this data we can evaluate the trends and deduce the growing confidence of businesses in the online marketplace.

Australian Data

The graph below exemplifies the steady incline of Australian domain name registrations. The .au Country Code Top Level Domain Name (ccTLD) and the following Second Level Domain Names .com.au, .net.au registrations continued to increase in 2006 at 28 percent growth rate over the previous year.

[Source: AusRegistry EOY Report, December 06]

Global Data

Overall domain name growth remained strong throughout the first three quarters of 2006 (based on United States fiscal calendar). The third quarter ended with a total of 112 million domain names in existence worldwide, across all of the Top Level Domain Names (TLDs). The Country Code Top Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) grew 28 percent during 2005 and 2006 with 8.8 million new registrations. To date, the five largest Top Level Domains are .com, the German ccTLD (.de), .net, the British ccTLD (.uk) and org.

[Source: Verisign, Domain Name Industry Brief, November 2006]

Conclusions

The domain name registration growth of Australia's ccTLD (.au) directly mirrored global trends of 28 percent growth. However this was only 1.8 percent of the global registrations of ccTLDs in a twelve-month period.

Strict regulations unquestionably restrict the number of Australian ccTLDs registrations. Regulations stipulate that businesses present proof of legitimate company or business use (ABN, ACN, BRN or trademark) upon registration of a .com.au domain name.