Under changes that came into effect yesterday, it is apparently now a lot easier to buy an Australian domain, or dot AU, name that has recently expired, than it was before.

Even if the “erstwhile” owner had, say, forgotten to make a licence renewal payment on the day of the name’s renewal, it now seemingly goes up for grabs immediately, according to Bruce Tonkin (video, 4 mins approx), Chief Technology Officer, at Melbourne IT, the dot AU domain name registrar.

Should you omit to renew the domain on the due date, and someone else snaps it up immediately the name returns to the market, then:

You will find it very hard to get that name back without paying a considerable sum of money.

Yet you still cannot obtain a dot AU name for the purposes of selling it back to the “legitimate” owner for profit, under cybersquatting protections outlined in the dot AU resolution policy.

So if I get wind of an Australian startup in the making, and buy their name ahead of them, with the intention of selling it back to the startup for profit, that won’t work.

If however Australian department store David Jones, for example, overlooked renewing their domain name, could I therefore nab it, and demand an extortionate sum of money for its return?

Wouldn’t that be called cybersquatting, albeit after act, as it were, though?

Do expired domain names now have less protection than previously unregistered names?