An LNP childish game

An LNP staffer in Brisbane has registered the albanese.com.au Internet domain and redirected it to the Liberal Party website. I first noticed the story on INQueensland but it is also reported elsewhere.

Registering a domain is not difficult or expensive but a .com.au domain does require an ABN. This effort does appear to be in breach of the .auDA regulations for .au domain names. The regulations require that .com.au and .net.au domain names must be “a match of the Person’s company, business, statutory or Personal name” or otherwise related to the person or company registering the domain. That is clearly not the case in this instance. The following information is from the Whois entry for the Albanese.com.au domain:

Registrant Contact Name: Sam Jackson
Tech Contact Name: Sam Jackson
Registrant: Liberal National Party

I can’t see how that can be in compliance with the regulation and the registration should not have been allowed by the registrar, GoDaddy.

It seems unlikely that anybody going to the albanese.com.au site and finding it linked to the Liberal Party would be fooled. Rather than playing silly games the LNP would be better to spend its efforts making such fraudulent activity more difficult to perpetrate.