[LINK] .au

[Craig Sanders]

On Thu, Feb 09, 2023 at 01:50:29PM +1100, Roger Clarke wrote:
> The auDA idiocy of opening the TLD has resulted in benefits for
> registrars and auDA, to the tune of 716,000 .au direct domains, most of
> them merely defensive and unnecessary.  At least $5m p.a. for nix.
>
> https://assets.auda.org.au/a/2023-02/auda_2022_qr4_report.pdf

It's worth noting that both Karl Marx and Adam Smith despised landlords and
other rent-seeking behaviour.  Reviled it as parasitism of the worst kind -
fatally destructive of both economies and societies.

Unfortunately, capitalism inevitably tends towards both monopoly AND
rent-seeking without adequate (and strongly enforced!) regulation to prevent
them.

It's why the entire corporate world - not just "big tech" - is doing their
damnedest to destroy the idea of ever owning anything, forcing the acceptance
of perpetually leasing everything.  Pay full price up-front and still be
stuck with the on-going expense and insecurity of hire-purchase.  All backed
up by anti-sovereignty agreements (misnamed as "free trade" agreements)
requiring the adoption of DMCA and similar criminal-contempt-of-business-model
laws (making it a crime to remove the original firmware and replace it with
something that isn't hostile to the buyer).

auDA's idiocy was predictable, parasitism is almost mandatory these days.  And
preventable if the government had any guts.

craig

PS: according to my spam-blocking logs, I'm still getting regularly spammed
by some extremely dodgy-looking registrar threatening that my domains will
be cancelled if I don't buy the .au versions from them.  They pretend that
they're the registrar for the domains I do own (they're not), with the Subject
header "Your domain will be canceled !" and starting the spam with "Dear
Customer, Refusal to renew your domain name".

The spams have an Australian registrar's domain in the From: header and
their ABN in the message body, but are sent from German IP addresses.  To be
fair, I'm not 100% sure that the Australian registrar is behind these scam
emails. Only about 95% sure - they seem dodgy to me and they have a less
than stellar reputation, but there is some chance that some other scammer is
mis-using their name. I'm blocking the spam, and I don't care enough to bother
investigating further (or even enough to bother calling to yell at them to
stop spamming me).

Bogus threats like these are probably responsible for a significant percentage
of those 716,000 domains - with many/most domain owners buying in panic
because they have no idea that they're being scammed.

I'd only just renewed by domains a few months before they started, and had to
spend some time figuring out if it was just a scam or a real problem with my
domain reg....and I've been involved in internet and ISP-related stuff since
the early 1990s, with a lot of knowledge and experience, so what hope does a
normal citizen with a personal domain or small business owner have of figuring
it out?