Australia's domain name industry regulator - au Domain Administration Ltd. appears to have lost another legal battle.
This time its in the Supreme Court in Queensland. Melbourne based registrar - Domain Directors (i.e Instra Ltd) brought an action against auDA there to stop the regulator stripping the company of a domain name - auregistry.com.au.
Part of the problem is that the name is so close to that of the official Australian domain name registry - ausregistry.com.au
AusRegistry can't be happy about Instra having the name. But as Instra had first registered the name many years ago it has a very solid claim to the name.
However when Instra advertised the name for sale late last year, auDA reacted by setting in motion the process for deleting the name.
Instra responded by appealing to the Supreme Court for an injunction and the case was listed for hearing on the 2nd Feb 2009.
Industry sources have told eCommerce Report that the hearing didn't go ahead because auDA has effectively conceded.
This is the second time in the last year that auDA has lost a major court battle.
As we reported in eCommerce Report last year, auDA spent 2 years and a lot of money defending an action by a Melbourne based Internet entrepreneur to get his domain names back.
But eventually, auDA ceased defending the action and agreed to restore the names.
We reported that auDA had lost the case and promptly got a call from auDA's lawyers threatening to sue us.
It seemed that we couldn't say auDA had lost the case because they had settled, and the case had not actually been decided by the courts.
auDA has now lost another legal action.
No doubt it will claim the action wasn't lost because it was never decided by the Court.
Even so, Instra didn't lose its domain name and that fact speaks itself in terms of deciding who won and who lost the legal battle.
The full story will soon be at to www.ecommercereport.com.au
And in the meantime check out www.auregistry.com.au
