25 August 2022

Opinion piece published in the Herald Sun, 25 August 2022.Yet this is the very real prospect facing small and family businesses unless they take urgent action to safeguard their brand and identity. A new system is being introduced allowing anyone with a connection to Australia to register the .au category of a domain name. It’s a crisp, abridged domain name that tells people your business name and that you are based in Australia. Instead of ending with .com.au, .net.au, .asn.au, etc, people can have a shorter name. For example, shoes.com.au could be shoes.au However, this change being imposed by the non-government regulator, .au Domain Administration (auDA), could have momentous consequences that may yet see businesses lose their customer base or be at the mercy of cyber criminals impersonating them if they do not proactively sign up to the new system. The auDA has decided that Australian businesses with an existing domain name will only have until September 20 to register their equivalent .au name before it becomes available to the general public. With only a handful of weeks to go until this deadline, my worry is that hardly any small businesses I’ve met are aware this is taking place and many of their industry associations are aghast at how little is known about this. Ask yourself: would I be upset if someone else had the .au version of my existing domain name? Would I feel that the digital engagement I’ve developed with my customers would be compromised if I didn’t have that abridged version? I’m urging small businesses to safeguard their brand and identity on the internet or risk seeing impersonators, webname ‘campers’ or cyber criminals take up domain names just like theirs. It’s worth spending a few minutes and a few dollars to protect your digital assets, to reduce the risk of squatting on your domain name or someone demanding much more money down the track to sell your name back to you. The Australian Cyber Security Centre has issued an alert that “opportunistic cyber criminals could register your .au domain name in an attempt to impersonate your business”. Wit

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Acknowledgement of Country

We acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of country throughout Australia and acknowledge their continuing connection to land, water and community.

We pay our respects to the people, the cultures and the Elders past, present and emerging.