| Australia's biggest domain name registry, Melbourne IT Ltd, has warned further deregulation of the market would damage the quality of Australian internet addresses. The comments by Melbourne IT chief executive Theo Hnarakis come as a review gets underway into the way domain names are registered and transferred by the domain name regulator - .au Domain Administration (auDA). Currently domain names cannot be owned outright. Instead they are used under a licence that must be renewed annually and there are restrictions on the onselling of that licence. Mr Hnarakis said any further deregulation of the local market could destroy brand names as internet addresses become pieces of virtual real estate. "It (the .au market) stands apart from what is going on in the .com space," Mr Hnarakis told AAP after Melbourne IT's AGM. "That's a good thing, not a bad thing. "There are market forces out there that are looking always to cash in on a .au and actually make it more like real estate where it can be traded openly. "That will create a lot more cyber-squatting. It will destroy the credibility of .au, and the integrity of .au." Melbourne IT, a University of Melbourne start-up company before it floated, held a monopoly over domain names registration until the market was first deregulated in 2002. Mr Hnarakis said the .com market was now a free-for-all with "infringements everywhere". Currently, Australian consumers, especially parents of internet-surfing children, could be assured that when they land on the website of a prominent organisation or company it won't turn out to be a pornography or gaming site, he said. "There's a good balance in the .au market," he said. "There's an element of self-regulation. There's an overseeing role for government and there's an overseeing role for the authority, being auDA." Mr Hnarakis anticipated potential criticism that Melbourne IT was trying to protect its market share, noting that domain name registration was only a small part of its business. Internationally, Melbourne IT is the fifth largest domain name registry, with around five million of the 100 million domain names under management. Around six per cent of those names are .au, although the IT company will not reveal what proportion of the local market it holds. However, that proportion has been stable over the past few years, Mr Hnarakis said. "We don't get transfixed any longer about domain name revenue. Domain revenue, as a percentage of overall revenue, is becoming less and less." One of the biggest names in the Melbourne IT camp is board member Lucy Turnbull, the wife of federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull. As she was re-elected on Tuesday, Ms Turnbull told shareholders she would not be using her influence in high places. "You can be quite assured I will not be speaking to any ministers about anything to do with Melbourne IT," she said. 责任编辑：米尊 |