The digital economy received a boost this week with domain regulator, The Australian Domain Administration (auDA), marking the two millionth .au domain name registration.
According to auDA, there were only 275,000 .au domains registered when it introduced a new regulatory model in 2002.
auDa chief executive officer, Chris Disspain, said the growth was mostly due to more companies registering their business online.
Globally, the rapid growth of domain names has led to the creation of Internet standard IPv6 which will mean trillions of new addresses to address the shortage of IPv4 names.
AusRegistry chief executive officer, Adrian Kinderis, said in a statement that .au is now one of the most widely used country code domains in the world.
“The .au domain has the highest penetration rate in the world for regulated namespaces with restricted eligibility when you take into account our population," he said. "We have seen continual strong growth in the namespace despite the global financial crisis and other market factors.”
Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, said in a statement the milestone was evidence of Australia’s growing digital economy and he was pleased to see more Australians getting an online presence.
“The Internet offers incredible opportunities to businesses, organisations and individuals and the continued growth of the .au domain shows how much Australians are embracing the online world in almost all aspects of their lives,” he said in a statement.
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