The Australian Domain Administrator (auDA) has announced the details of the 320 rare geographic domain names that will be made available to register on 21 October 2007. The domains to be released include such potentially exciting domains as canberra.com.au, bluemountain.com.au, sydney-markets.com.au and bondi-beach.net.au.

Geographic domains attract huge business interest due to their high natural traffic, particularly for tourism. These 320 domains are the last to be released from the reserved list, making it unlikely that many of these names will become available again.

The 2005 ballot of 2700 Australian geographic domains saw nearly10,000 applications, illustrating the attractiveness and rarity of these domains. For example, perth.com.au received 138 applications from businesses that realised the potential of using the domain as a gateway to their online business.

The original $825.00 registration fee (inc. GST) will remain in place for the first five days of release. This is the fee that was required in the 2005 ballot and is still required to make up the loss of revenue incurred when the ballot winner defaulted on payment. These domains were used to fund the new community geographic domains that were released in 2006.

After 2.00pm on 26 October 2007, the remaining domain names will revert to the usual com.au and net.au registration fee.

The full list is available on NetRegistry’s website from today.