The Australian Government’s interactive report, Communications and media in Australia: How we use the Internet, highlighted that 99% of Australians spent time online in 2020.
One of the key issues for Internet users in Australia is trust. We have seen a prolific rise of scams targeting Australian consumers online. Australians lost over $851 million to scams in 2020, a record amount, as scammers took advantage of the pandemic to trick unsuspecting people out of their hard-earned money, according to the ACCC’s Targeting Scams report.
The majority of these scams were perpetrated by overseas fraudsters who sought to take advantage of Australia’s high Internet consumption. As a result, Australian consumers prefer to connect to local websites with an Australian domain name address because the chances of being scammed is significantly lessened. On this point, Auda, is the administrator of Australia’s .au top level domain, research shows that:
- 92 percent of survey respondents associated the com.au domain with local businesses
- Businesses with com.au domain names were almost twice as likely to have their website considered trustworthy and secure than those using other commercial domain names.
The growth of the .com.au domain name space has been phenomenal, with over 3.3 million domain names registered. In Q1 2021, AuDA recorded a 23% increase in new domain names, or 154,00 more domains, than the same quarter last year.
.AU Safeguard
The .au domain name space is what we call a restricted domain namespace. Only online Australian entities with a current ABN or ACN, AU TM owners, and local residents can register an .au domain name. This policy has been recently sharpened, with AuDA introducing new rules that tighten the Au. eligibility policy even further.
Auda has been very proactive in protecting Australian consumers and in addition to the new policy, are encouraging Australian Registrar’s to audit their domain name portfolio to ensure compliance with the new rules.
The .au TLD is highly credible and is the most trusted domain name space among local consumers. If legitimate entities want to do business with Australians, then getting a .com.au domain name is critical to establishing a baseline level of trust.
About brandsec
brandsec is a corporate domain name management and brand protection company that looks after many of Australia, New Zealand and Asia’s top publicly listed brands. We provide monitoring and enforcement services, DNS, SSL Management, domain name brokerage and dispute management and brand security consultation services.