auDA Closes Loophole on Domain Tasting

auDA  the administrator of the .au namespace, has updated it’s Registrar Agreement which sets out how a registrar must perform its obligations.

Registrars  are accredited by auDA, giving them direct access to the registry and provide .au domain name services to the Australian community. They register .au domain name licences at the wholesale price which at the time of writing is set at $9,30 AUD.

One of the more controversial issues has been the subject of Domain Tasting, which involves registering domain names, often in bulk, assessing how much traffic they generate, then cancelling them under the three day Cooling Off Period and getting a refund on their registration costs. Domain tasting is generally frowned upon by the domain industry and has been regulated in most namespaces.

Unfortunately in the Australian namespace this practice has been occurring over the last 6 months due to the existence of a cooling off period in the au Licensing Rules, which is there for the benefit of a registrant who may have registered a name inadvertently, eg a spelling mistake, and wishes to cancel it.

Many registrars have their own voluntary rules to curb this practice, however one company has registered and cancelled over 250,000 domain names in the last 6 months through several Australian registrars. You can read about it on the Assets website here,

auDA has attempted to tackle the domain tasting issue in it’s new 2025 Registrar Agreement and have included a clause to address it.

The Registrar must not do any of the following:

(f) in respect of any month, provide refunds for more than 10% of the total number of Licence Agreements entered into by the Registrar under clause 6.4 in that month due to the Registrant cancelling within any cooling off period that applies under the Licensing Rules, unless an exemption has been granted by auDA to permit a higher proportion of refunds in that month

This addresses the issue to some degree however they have not gone as far as the ICANN AGP Policy which also limits deletions to 50 domains.

During any given month, an Operator shall not offer any refund to an ICANN-accredited registrar (hereinafter referred to as “Registrar”) for any domain names deleted during the AGP that exceed (i) 10% of that Registrar’s net new registrations (calculated as the total number of net adds of one-year through ten-year registrations as defined in the monthly reporting requirement of Operator Agreements) in that month, or (ii) fifty (50) domain names, whichever is greater, unless an exemption has been granted by an Operator.

Given that auDA consulted with the registrars on the new agreement, and the high volumes of domains being tasted, it seems that auDA missed an opportunity to nip the practice in the bud and whether they went far enough.

You can read find the Registrar Agreement and more about registrars on the auDA website