Surely, you can't be serious?
Would you like to provide proof that auDA have provided a bona fide business case? They haven't provided one yet despite what the titles on documents might say.
If you will not accept their documents then I cannot provide further proof
They have literally provided no legitimate evidence of any proof of demand based on the full facts.
They have relied on flawed conflicted third party (supply side) evidence including a survey of a single question. The infamous single question survey by the conflicted third party that sells domains - "would you buy a .au domain if available?"
I assume you know they took these allegations seriously and undertook their own survey via an uninvolved third party to see if the Netregistry survey was flawed and it came back with very similar results right? We have to at some point conceded that this has been looked into.
How intellectually and ethically bankrupt can you get?
All of your conjured (by auDA?) weak examples of need, can be satisfied by getting an ABN which is not actually a serious barrier. The take up of .id.au and .com.au (not to mention very low demand of .net.au domains) completely undermines any demand (tiny) and supply issues (no supply issues - record domain sales of .com.au over last 12 months right?).
.id.au is a terrible extension as no one recognised it as a real domain name, it used to fail the regular expression parsing tests of valid emails all the time.
With regards to tiny demand... it has been reported that about 30% of attempted purchases of .com.au domains fail during the shopping cart process at the ABN barrier, with many customers then deciding to use a .xyz or .info domain instead. This loss of Australian businesses to non-au namespaces is not good for anyone in our business and is terrible in terms of regulatory oversight and consumer protection.
The shorter domains argument is monumentally weak and can be countered by arguing that .com.au should just be changed to .au for no cost to current .com.au owners.
This would be much too significant a shift to force on everyone at the same time, making a different namespace available is much more sensible and allows people to chose and or to use both in the future
Your "yeah but" cost argument, shifts the focus away from it being a completely unnecessary cost. And it's not just the cost of the extra domains. It's the other hidden costs.
Such as the costs of fighting to protect brands in other legal areas including passing off and having to get trade marks. The cost of engaging a lawyer. I'd suggest it costs the equivalent about 50 domains to talk to a lawyer and probably another 100 to just send a threatening letter.
I agree on lawyers being expensive but I don't see how .au is different to .net.au or id.au or .org.au in that regards and we have lawyers and stuff dealing with that all the time already. It is not like this is a new problem.
You would think all of the new domain rules (you know the ones that nobody can understand and are 10 times the length of the old ones and that they have to publish explanatory brochures to explain the new rules....) were written by a domain lawyer to profit from the ensuing lawyer heaven (more Ferraris on order?).
You are right, the new rules are tricky and have some rules that are literally enforceable, auDA is doing the best they can with the rules and in my experience that are taking into account the real world more and more every day.
Now lets talk about the contested domains and the wrangling that's going to cost the .com.au owner. What amount do you reckon insurance.com.au owner is going to offer the other domain owners to give up their rights to the .au version? Do you reckon they'll just say nah you take it. The argument that it's only a very few actual domains in contest is no salve for the owners of ones that are.
If insurance.com.au wants to lock out insurance.net.au from the .au then they can just pay $10 per year to keep the domain locked up. They don't "have" to pay anything to the owner of the .net.au. In reality companies are going to try to get others to give up their rights. We bought drop.net.au just recently for exactly that reason. In reality if the .net.au owner had wanted more money than the cost of some lawyers and and auDRP then we might have not bought it, or if the auDRP route was even too expensive we could have just tied it up for the next 5 years for $50. It was not a big drama and was way less expensive or risky to our business than when the aircon unit started blowing rainwater into the server room.
auDA have a major goal of protecting the integrity and public trust of the .com.au environment but with the intended relaxation of requirements to get .au (direct registrations), this is a massive own goal. UBU's are an issue right or you used to think so.
The requirements around .au are pretty hardcore by the way... they require us to get passport numbers and or drivers licenses and then to certify those against a third party data source. So pretty similar to opening a bank account. So this is going to actually be a tighter set or requirements than the current "just pick an ABN out of thin air" requirements for .com.au
The UBUs on .com.au, .org.au and id.au domains is getting worse by the day and even with auDA's pattern matching experts working we found a few thousand UBUs just last week and reported them to auDA. We even found a few hundred this week and are in the process of reporting them.
The problems never seem to change that much over the years, they just seem to move around a little.