Your .com.au domain can be cancelled if your ABN lapses

Here is a risk almost nobody plans for. Your .com.au domain is not something you own outright. It is a licence, and that licence depends on you continuing to meet the eligibility rules for the entire time you hold it.

Let the underlying business identifier lapse and the domain can be cancelled. Every email address on it stops working. The website disappears. And the name goes back into the pool.

What eligibility actually requires

To hold a .com.au you need an Australian presence, and for most businesses that means an active ABN or ACN. An ARBN works, and so does an Australian trade mark.

The part that catches people is the word "continuing". You have to meet the requirement at registration and keep meeting it. auDA enforces this, and domains do get cancelled when the registered entity is no longer eligible, such as when an ABN has been cancelled or a company deregistered.

How businesses lose eligibility without meaning to

Nobody wakes up and cancels their ABN. It happens sideways.

• The ABN goes dormant. The Australian Taxation Office cancels ABNs that show no business activity, and notices go to whatever address is on file, which may be an accountant you stopped using in 2019.
• The business restructures. You move from a sole trader ABN to a company. The new entity is fine, the domain is still registered against the old identifier, and nobody updates it.
• The company is deregistered. Perhaps a dormant entity you kept for a reason that stopped applying.
• It was registered by someone else entirely. This is the most common and the most dangerous. The domain sits under a web developer's ABN, or a former partner's, and you have no control over it at all.

The one that should worry you most

Domains registered under someone else's identifier are alarmingly common, usually because a developer set everything up during a build a decade ago and it was easier at the time.

If that is your situation, the domain is not yours in any meaningful sense. If that person disappears, retires, or falls out with you, recovering it ranges from awkward to impossible. And if their ABN lapses, your domain is exposed to a decision you will never hear about.

This is worth checking today rather than at some future point of crisis.

How to check, in about five minutes

1. Look up your domain in a WHOIS service and find the registrant name and the eligibility identifier recorded against it.
2. Check that identifier on the ABN Lookup register and confirm it is active.
3. Confirm the registrant is your current legal entity, not a previous structure and not a third party.
4. Check which email address the registrar has for renewal notices, and make sure someone still reads it.

If any of those is wrong, fix it now. A transfer or a change of registrant is routine paperwork while everything is in order, and a genuine problem once the domain has been cancelled.

The name matching rule

There is a second requirement worth knowing. The domain should relate closely to your registered business name or to goods and services you actually provide. This rarely causes problems for a business using its own name, but it matters if you are registering descriptive domains for campaigns.

While you are in there

A few adjacent things break in the same silent way.

Domain auto renewal. Turn it on, and make sure the card on file has not expired. A surprising number of outages are simply an unpaid renewal.

Registrar account access. More than one person in the business should be able to get in. Sole access held by one director on a personal email is a single point of failure.

SSL certificate renewal. Usually automatic, occasionally not. An expired certificate shows every visitor a full page security warning, which is about as bad as an outage.

These are the kinds of things a care plan exists to watch, precisely because they fail quietly and at inconvenient moments.

Why it matters more than it sounds

Losing a domain is not like losing a website. A website can be rebuilt from a backup in a day. A domain carries your email, your search rankings, every link anyone has ever made to you, and every business card in circulation. It is the one asset in your digital setup that is genuinely hard to replace.

Five minutes of checking is a reasonable price for that.

See how we work with Australian businesses, or get in touch if you would like someone to look over your setup.