Moved

Just a single letter difference in the URL: we’ve moved from the top-level ccTLD for the Pacific island nation of Niue, .nu to the island continent of Australia .au. The former was always a bit of a semantic stretch, and was set up at a time when it appeared that doing so was supporting internet infrastructure on Niue. I’m not sure that’s the case any more. The domain is registered through a company that appears to be based in New York, and the domain and DNS records appear to be administered through Sweden (the Nordic countries like .nu because it means something like “new” in their languages, I think). At least it allowed for a fairly short URL.

Up until recently there hasn’t been any mechanism to set up a similar domain in Australia, because the registrar had strict rules around the sorts of organizations that could register .com.au, .edu.au, .org.au, etc domains. Typically you needed at least a company registration to prove that the name meant something to you. That has changed this year with auDA opening up .au as a direct domain, with the only requirement being the ability to demonstrate a connection to the country. So: yay! Little bit of haggling and some exchange of fun coupons later and here we are.