The words: what they must match
Guide 3 of 7
Does a .com.au have to match your business name?
In com.au and net.au the words of the name must connect to the holder, and the Rules spell out which connections count. Where the holder’s Australian presence rests on a trade mark, the test is stricter: an exact match.
General information from auDA’s published rules, not legal advice. Published by Dotto, which runs a marketplace for .au names.
The ways to match
A Match takes the words or numbers of the holder’s legal name, business name or Australian trade mark: the name must use them in the same order and add nothing extra, and the comparison leaves out commercial status identifiers such as “Pty Ltd”, DNS endings such as com.au, punctuation, articles such as “a”, “the”, “and” or “of”, and ampersands (Rules 1.4, Match).
An Acronym is an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of a person’s name, goods, service, venue or event (Rules 1.4). A Synonym is a word or phrase that means the same or nearly the same thing as another word in English, judged by reference to the Oxford Australian Dictionary or Oxford Australian Thesaurus (Rules 1.4).
Where the holder’s Australian presence rests on an Australian trade mark, the test is an Exact Match: the name must be identical to the words of the mark, including all of them in the order they appear, leaving out DNS endings such as com.au, punctuation marks, articles such as “a”, “the”, “and” or “of”, and ampersands (Rules 1.4, Exact Match; Rules 2.4.5). An Australian trade mark means a pending application or a registered mark that appears on IP Australia’s trade mark database, and a pending mark is one whose status there is published or accepted (Rules 1.4).
The other connections in com.au and net.au: a Match or Acronym of a related body corporate’s name, or of a name of a partnership of which the holder is a partner or a trust of which the holder is a trustee; and a Match or Synonym of the name of a service the holder provides, goods it sells (retail or wholesale), an event it registers or sponsors, an activity it facilitates, teaches or trains, or premises it operates and is providing at the time of the application (Rules 2.4.4).
auDA’s own illustration of how far a Match reaches, paraphrased: a business name of two words, “Forexample Publishing”, may register each of the names below (Rules 1.4, the note to Match).
| Name | Why it matches |
|---|---|
| forexample | The first word on its own, taken from the business name. |
| forexamplepublishing | Both words, in order, with nothing added. |
| forexample-publishing | Both words in order, joined by a hyphen. |
| publishing | The second word on its own. |
The characters a name may use
The Rules’ syntax requirements: a name must be at least two characters long; contain only letters (a-z), numbers (0-9) and hyphens, or a combination; start and end with a number or a letter, never a hyphen; and not carry hyphens in the third and fourth positions (Rules 2.7.1).
Availability is a test of its own: a name is available where it is not already registered in the namespace applied for, is not a Reserved Name, and complies with the namespace’s syntax criteria (Rules 2.5.1). A name that omits or repeats a letter of a namespace is deceptively similar to it, and may not be applied for: auDA’s own examples are comm.au against com.au, and co.au against com.au (Rules 2.5.2 to 2.5.4).
Reserved names are not available: among them are a word, acronym or abbreviation restricted or prohibited under an Australian law; a name or abbreviation of an Australian state or territory, including the word “Australia”; and names that may pose a risk to the security, stability and integrity of the .au and global DNS (Rules 2.6.1).
Names in other scripts are not open yet: the Rules say the internationalised domain name paragraph will commence on a date to be advised (Rules 1.2.4).
A business name, a trade mark and a domain
A business name is registered nationally, and one registration covers the whole country; you do not register it separately with a state or territory (business.gov.au).
Registering a business name does not give exclusive rights to it. A trade mark is what gives exclusive rights to a business name in Australia (business.gov.au).
Before applying for a mark, IP Australia suggests searching existing trade marks to check that an idea or something similar is not already registered; its TM Checker is a free tool that gives feedback on whether a proposed mark is similar to existing ones (IP Australia).
A domain registration gives you the domain, nothing more: registering a name secures an internet address for customers to visit, and does not protect the business name (IP Australia).
And even a trade mark does not jump the queue for a name: no person has a better entitlement to a name in a namespace than any other, and a trade mark holder has no better entitlement to the same name in a namespace than anyone else (Rules 1.4, No Hierarchy of Rights).
Who may hold each ending is in Which .au ending can you hold?, and how a name changes hands is in How do you buy a .au name someone already holds?.