Whose Name Is on Your Front Door?

It’s a Monday morning in February. The practice manager walks into the managing partner’s office holding a printout.

“This came to the old info@ address. Someone forwarded it.”

“What is it?”

“It says our domain expired three weeks ago.”

“We pay for that. Don’t we?”

“The card on the account belongs to the bloke who built the website. In 2016.”

“So ring him.”

“His agency closed. The number’s disconnected.”

Nobody in the room knows which company holds the domain. Nobody has a login. And under the rules for .au names, the clock started three weeks ago.

Thirty days, then anyone

The .au Licensing Rules give you 30 calendar days after expiry to renew. After that, in auDA’s words, the name “will become available to the public on a First Come, First Served basis.”

So that’s the address on every engagement letter and every client email for the last decade. Thirty days, and then it goes to whoever turns up first with a credit card.

Depending on the registrar, the website and email can stop working well before day 30. That is usually how firms find out.

This keeps happening for a simple reason. A domain is the one part of the business that works for ten years without anyone touching it, so nobody checks it. You’d never let your conveyancer put the Collins Street office on the title in the conveyancer’s own name. With domains, it happens all the time.

When I ask a partner who owns their domain, I get one of four answers. Here is what each one is worth.

“We pay for it, so it’s ours.”

Paying the invoice does not make you the owner. In Australia you do not own a domain at all. You hold a licence for one to five years, and the holder is whoever is recorded as the “Registrant” in the registry.

If your web designer registered it under their own business and their own ABN, it is their licence. You’ve been paying for their name to point at your firm.

The rules saw this coming. An agent registering on your behalf “must ensure that the Person on whose behalf they are applying is recorded as the Registrant.” Most did. Some didn’t. In 2016 the job was to get the site live before a Friday launch, and the designer’s own account was the quickest place to put it.

The name on that record is about to matter more. In August 2026 auDA’s Board approved in-principle the recommendations of an external review of the rules. One would limit a .com.au to names that match the registrant’s own name, business name or trade mark. At the time of writing, the draft rules have not gone out for consultation and there is no start date.

Beware: A blank or “private” public lookup tells you very little. What counts is the Registrant name and ID in the registry record, and whose account the domain sits in.

“The web designer looks after that.”

They might. They might also hold your domain in one big account with 200 other clients’ names in it. They can’t give you that login without handing over everyone else’s too.

That works fine until the day they shut up shop.

We pick up expired domain names of other agencies/companies from time to time. The number one query we receive from them is “where is my domain?” (The irony isn’t lost on me. We’re the ones who end up holding the name.)

That is the easy version. The hard version is the supplier who is still around, still holds the licence, and wants to talk about an unpaid invoice first. That is where firms get taken for a ride.

You don’t need to sack the designer. Ask them to move the domain into an account set up for your firm, in your firm’s name, with your details on it. They can keep managing it from there. The difference is you could get it back without them.

“It’s on auto-renew.”

Auto-renew is the answer I hear most, and from what I see it is the weakest of the four. It runs on a card, and cards expire. The reminder emails go to whoever set it up, or to a staff member who left in 2019. Most offboarding covers laptops and passwords and skips the registrar, so add it to the list of things you do when someone leaves.

There is a second catch that is specific to .au. The rules say a licence is renewed where the registrar is “satisfied that the Person continues to meet the eligibility and allocation criteria.” So the payment going through is not the end of it. If the ABN on the record belongs to an entity you’ve since restructured or wound up, renewal can stall, and auto-renew will not save you.

The rules also say your details must be “complete, true and accurate throughout the Licence Period.” A licence can be suspended if you do not update them within 14 days of a change. If your firm changed structure in 2021 and never told the registrar, that’s ten minutes of someone’s time.

Tip: Put the expiry date in the firm calendar with a reminder 60 days out. The reminder is not to renew. It is to check someone in the firm can see the account, and that the card and contact email are still yours.

“Our IT provider has it.”

Possibly. But I’ll own this one for my side of the industry. For years it was normal for IT companies to register client domains in their own reseller accounts, because it was easy and it made the provider harder to leave.

That second part should never have been a business model.

I’m happy for your IT provider to manage the domain day to day. We do it for clients all the time. You should still know which registrar holds it, have your own login, and be able to get back in if we vanished tomorrow. If changing IT providers is on the back burner, sort this out before you give notice.

The domain also decides where your email goes. Your Microsoft 365 subscription can be paid up and working perfectly, and if someone changes the records behind the domain, your mail goes somewhere else.

The settings that stop people sending email pretending to be you live there too.

So ask your provider for four things, in writing: the registrar, the Registrant name and ID, the expiry date, and who has access to the account.

How to transfer domain ownership back to your firm

I don’t enjoy reading auDA’s rules any more than you would. The useful part fits on a page, and there are two different kinds of transfer that people mix up constantly.

Changing the registrar moves the domain from one provider to another. You need the transfer code (auDA calls it the authInfo code), which your current registrar can give you, or you can get it through auDA’s password recovery tool. It takes up to three days, and auDA’s transfer page says there’s no fee for moving a .au licence between registrars. It does not change who the licence belongs to.

Changing the registrant is the one that moves the licence to your firm. You start it through the current provider. Your firm has to be eligible on the day, sign a new licence agreement and pay the licence fee. Full years left on the licence carry across, up to five. Part years do not, so you are a little out of pocket there.

If the domain moves as part of a deal, like buying a practice or restructuring into a new entity, the rules say you must request the transfer within 28 days of the agreement, unless it says otherwise. Buying a business does not move its domain for you.

That’s how to transfer domain ownership when everyone cooperates. When the current registrant won’t, or can’t be found, it is a difficult nut to crack and I don’t have a shortcut for you. Pull together the original invoices, payment records, the emails from when it was set up, and any contract that mentions the website. Your registrar will tell you what evidence they’ll accept. If it turns into a real fight over who owns what, that’s a job for your lawyer.

Once it is in your name, turn on multi-factor authentication for the registrar account. Put the login in the firm’s password manager, and make sure at least two people know which registrar you use. However, none of this helps if someone already has your registrar login, which is why the multi-factor step comes first.

Five minutes, this week

Go to auDA’s WHOIS lookup, type in your firm’s domain, and read the line that says Registrant.

If it’s your firm’s name and ABN, good. Check the expiry date while you’re there and you’re done for the year.

If it’s a name you half remember from a web project in 2016… you’ve just found out who owns your front door.

If the name isn’t yours, talk to us about the change of registrant. We’ll do the paperwork with you and hand over the registrar, logins and renewal dates in writing, which is a lot cheaper than day 29.

Yener

Where these numbers come from

• .au Domain Administration Rules: Licensing, auDA, amended June 2026 (late renewal window, renewal eligibility, accurate information, agents, 28-day transfer rule)
• How to transfer your .au domain name, auDA
• .au Licensing Rules review completed by external Policy Advisory Panel, auDA statement, September 2026
• Licensing Rules Review 2025: Policy Advisory Panel Final Report, auDA, August 2026
• .au WHOIS lookup, auDA