New .au Domain Renewal, Expiry and Deletion Policy

auDA (the registry responsible for .au domain names) recently announced it will implement a new Domain Renewal, Expiry and Deletion Policy on 21 March 2010.

Under the new Policy:

• Registrars will be able to offer registrants a "domain sync" service, which allows a registrant to change the expiry date of all its .au domains to a date that is less than 2 years from the date of registration. This means that a registrant of numerous .au domain names can choose a common expiry date for all its domains. This will be useful from a domain name management perspective.
• The expiry procedure will operate as follows: Expiry Date -> Expired Hold (30 days) -> Expired Pending Purged (1 day) -> Domain Deleted.
• Expired and deleted .au domain names will be published on the Official Domain Drop List when they become "eligible for purge". The list willl be extremely useful for those who want to recovery domain names or those involved in the domain name aftermarket not to mention our good old friends the cybersquatter.

The full policy can be found at http://www.auda.org.au/pdf/auda-2010-01.pdf.