Policy for the wattle.id.au domain

David Keegel, 2000-07-31

Highlights

For wattle.id.au, you must request a domain name based on your surname. (See below for details.)
Applications normally take 7-14 days to be processed.

Background

This document started as a translation into HTML of the previous policy for wattle.id.au, but this is now the official policy document.

Purpose

The main purpose of the id.au zone (and also wattle.id.au within it), is to enable individuals to register domain names which may remain constant over a long period of time (eg: 5-10 years).

The domain (and the individuals' E-mail address within it) should still be usable without change even if individuals change network providers (ISPs), use a different machine for Internet access, change jobs, or move interstate (or even overseas, if they choose to retain an Australian identity).

The service offered is DNS registration/delegation of a sub-domain of wattle.id.au. In other words, adding resource records to the DNS for your sub-domain. No addresses are available directly as user@wattle.id.au (except those used for the wattle.id.au registry itself, such as hostmaster).

For Email, the wattle.id.au registry can implement MX records to direct any Email in your surname.wattle.id.au domain to a particular mail server, but wattle.id.au does NOT provide a mail server to accept or forward that mail.

Charging

Registration in wattle.id.au is free of charge and shall remain available for free for the foreseeable future.

Successful applicants are guaranteed that they will not be charged any renewal fees in future, at least while David Keegel is the wattle.id.au administrator. The reason for this is so that intending applicants can be confident that if successful, they will not face pressure to change domains in future because of renewal fees, in line with the main purpose.

Registration

Any qualified applicant (such as an individual or a family; or as defined by the id.au administrator) who is a resident of Australia or a citizen of Australia (at the time of application) shall be granted a domain name under wattle.id.au after receipt of a complete and correct application, provided that domain name is not already taken and is not considered obscene by the wattle.id.au administrator.

Applicants are REQUIRED to use their surname (or an abbreviation thereof) as the domain name. Or alternatively applicants with common surnames may use the initial of their first name followed by their surname (for example, dkeegel).

Some reasons for requiring the surname as the domain name are:-

the applicants surname is quite unlikely to change over time, whereas a favourite word may not be so favoured in five or ten years time.

It makes it clear who the owner of the domain is, minimising the risk of having other people use the same domain name without realising who it belongs to, and later finding that they need to change their E-mail address.

It allows other members of a family to join in using the same domain at a later time, without needing to register a new domain. (Note that this is not always appropriate.)

It frees applicants from the burden of choosing an appropriate name (although applicants are still expected to choose hostnames and user names, or to be more general the left hand side of E-mail addresses).

It opens the way for E-mail addresses like David@Keegel.wattle.id.au (This is in fact the personal domain name of the current wattle.id.au administrator, but please note that all correspondence regarding wattle.id.au should be sent to hostmaster at nic.wattle.id.au so that it can be filed into the right mailbox and in case the administrator of wattle.id.au changes over time.)

If choosing a particular name is important to the applicant, there are other id.au domains available with policies allowing this.

Registration and delegation of the domain will normally be completed in 7-14 days from receipt of a valid and complete application. For other applications, a query or rejection notice would normally be issued in about 14 days.

Where the applicant is not an individual (natural person) or a small group of individuals with some close relationship to each other (such as a family), the application would be rejected (subject to appeal to the id.au administrator).
Larger groups of individuals are requested to submit separate applications. This is to maximise the chances of achieving one of the major goals of the id.au domain :- that individuals may use the same E-mail address unchanged for many years.
Companies, educational institutions, government authorities, net- work providers, associations and other miscellenous organisations are requested to apply for a name within the appropriate domain hierarchy within AU (com.au edu.au gov.au net.au asn.au org.au), and will not be granted domains within wattle.id.au (or most likely in any other sub-domain of id.au for that matter).
Where the applicant is not a resident of Australia or a citizen of Australia, the administrator of wattle.id.au would need to be convinced of the appropriateness of a name within the *.au namespace.
Once domain names are granted, applicants may continue to use them even if they cease to be residents or citizens of Australia. They are of course welcome to investigate setting up another domain name in their new country if the move is a permanent one.
Where a name is considered to be obscene (or against the public interest), the administrator of wattle.id.au may need to be convinced of the need for such a name.

Justification in non-standard cases (where the numbered paragraphs apply) is not required to be a essay -- a few sentences should suffice initially, assuming further questions can be answered by e-mail.

These cases are subject to appeal to the id.au administrator, who may direct that the application should be accepted anyway. Alternatively, you may apply for registration in another id.au zone.

Termination

Registration within wattle.id.au may be terminated if:

the applicant, the id.au administrator, or a court of competent jurisdiction requests it, OR
the administrator of wattle.id.au cannot contact the applicant using the contact information stored in the database (where the total cost of contact attempts is less than one dollar per applicant), OR
the domain name is used for illegal or anti-social purposes (eg: harrassment, mail bombing, spamming), in the judgement of the administrator of wattle.id.au, OR
information supplied in the application or otherwise supplied by the applicant to the administrator of wattle.id.au regarding the domain is found to have been fraudulent (deliberately false), in the judgment of the administrator of wattle.id.au.

Inherited Policies

The following policies are inherited from the id.au policy. (See also Rik's summary.)

Wattle.id.au is run by the administrator of wattle.id.au as an agent for the id.au domain administrator (Robert Elz <kre@munnari.oz.au>, at present).

A database shall be maintained by the wattle.id.au administrator containing information about the people to whom allocations of names within wattle.id.au have been made, including contact information independent of the network.

This database shall also be replicated at an independent location by a totally independent person (Giles Lean <giles@nemeton.com.au> at present, in the case of wattle.id.au).

The database shall be encrypted to protect the confidentiality of the contact information, but the keeper of the replicated copy shall have access to a method of decrypting this database, in case the administrator falls under a bus or similar. A few select people (such as the id.au domain administrator) may also be given access to decryption methods in future.

While it is the wattle.id.au administrator's responsibility to ensure that this database is kept up-to-date, the co-operation of registrants in the domain by informing the administrator of any changes to their contact details would be highly appreciated and recommended.

The terms of this policy shall not be varied substantially without at least one month's notice (barring minor syntactic changes which do not affect the meaning of the policy). In the case of a change, all those registered in wattle.id.au have the option of continuing under the terms that were in effect at the time they registered.

The wattle.id.au domain may in future be "closed" if the number of entries in the domain becomes excessive.

Should the wattle.id.au administrator become unable to continue providing service for wattle.id.au, he will notify the id.au zone administrator, and if possible to hand-over all relevant information to a new zone administrator appointed by the id.au zone administrator.

The wattle.id.au administrator also agrees to stand aside (and co-operate in handing over to a successor as above) if the id.au zone administrator considers him not to be keeping to the id.au policy in the administration of wattle.id.au and requests his resignation (so to speak).

David Keegel, wattle.id.au administrator

Created 1995-04-05. Revised 1999-03-28. Editorial update 2000-07-31.