-Australians should be concerned that the domain names of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide were -- and remain -- captured by commercial interests," NSW Information Technology Minister Kim Yeadon said.
The -One city One site" proposal developed by the NSW government is seeking to stop commercial operators owning domain names such as 'Sydney' and giving it back to the community.
The proposal outlines that commercial operators may use a geographic name only if it has a prefix that identifies it as a business.
Currently, geographic names are not available to the local communities they are named after, according to Yeadon.
-Under One City One Site, geographical domain names of Australian states, territories, cities and towns would not be licensed to individuals or individual business," Yeadon said.
The proposal will seek the support of all Australian governments to be presented to the national domain name authority, auDA, for review.
All Governments have the .GOV.AU domain to develop web sites for every city in Australia. The .GOV.AU domain was intended for this purpose but the governments have largely ignored it. The only reason governments are now trying to move on the .COM.AU city names is because they want to exploit the names commercially and turn government into big business. The Brisbane City Council tried to go down this route, backed by one of Australia's largest companies, but failed in its attempts to hijack the domain name Brisbane.com.
The NSW government should leave commercial domains alone. Their move is also little more than attempted hijacking of domain names that were legally registered by individuals who were fortunate enough - and smart enough - to register these names first. If the names were owned by Mr Packer or Mr Murdoch, would the Minister or any politician attempt something like this? Hardly.