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Domainer AI slop crackdown on the cards in Oz

Kevin Murphy, September 8, 2026, 01:52:43 (UTC), Domain Registries

Startling rule changes have been proposed for Australia’s .au domain, potentially making it much tougher and more expensive to register names to monetize or resell.

If implemented, the proposed new rule “effectively limits a registrant to registering a domain name that matches its name, business name or trade mark” in the .com.au and .net.au namespaces.

The recommendation, one of 10 to come out of a yearlong Policy Advisory Panel review, would remove the part of .au’s eligibility rules that currently acts essentially as a catch-all allowing people to register domains for any purpose.

The change seems to be squarely aimed at making it harder for domain investors to populate the namespaces with large amounts of low-quality monetized domains, particularly now that generative AI has trivialized the practice.

Local registry auDA said its board of directors has approved the panel’s recommendations and will create an implementation plan that will be published for public consultation before coming into effect.

The decision to restrict who can register what domains was the most controversial of the recommendations, with four of the seven-person panel voting in favor of the change, with two votes against and one abstention (who later sided with the minority view).

The panel unanimously voted against the idea of banning domain monetization outright, but said it “reached a different majority view on the use of monetisation to satisfy the allocation rules”.

The panel found that allowing registration purely for monetization “may disproportionately benefit domain investors and weaken trust in the allocation framework”.

The current rule was “viewed either as a legitimate source of flexibility or as a self-fulfilling loophole enabling monetisation”, the panel wrote.

It noted: “The consumer harm identified in submissions was most acute where monetisation was used to achieve allocation. Advances in artificial intelligence have also made it easier to create payper-click websites for this purpose.”

A minority of the panel issued a 10-point rebuttal to the majority view, saying they had failed to identify any harms created by the current rules and that the change could make it harder for the likes of schools or charities to register domains.

The panel attempted to measure how many .au domains are currently in the hands of investors, by assuming that anyone owning more than 50 names was a likely domainer, and found that well over half a million of .au’s 4.4 million domains could be in domainer hands.

It said: “auDA data shows that 3,386 registrants hold more than 50 Domain Name Licences across com.au, net.au and .au direct, out of 1,702,174 registrants in those namespaces. Together, those registrants hold 582,895 domain names.”

The full report of the panel can be read here (pdf).

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