A Sydney (Australia) web based business has had its registered domain name removed. This came about after only 24 hours notice from AuDA (Australia's domain name administration authority) after it was found to have “wrongly lapsed” from its previous owner last year.

The former owner of propertymatch.com.au (David Widjaja) received an email from AuDA on Tuesday and was then left to inform his staff (and a major investor) that the business was closed. This was due to a dispute with the new web sites domain and was only a month before the site planned to go live. "auDA only gave me 24 hours notice to give the domain name back to the original owner. I'd spent a year developing an entire business plan around it," said Widjaja in an interview today

The origins of the dispute arose when auDA had incorrectly allowed Widjaja to register the domain late last year, this was despite the fact it had already been renewed by its original owner. This mistake was only discovered more than 12 months later As a result of the decision Widjaja had to tell his major financial backer that the business was no longer a viable asset without the domain name. He was also forced to fire two full time staff and the investor is now pursuing AU $50,000 in lost revenue

The owner and chief operator of the web host that hosted Widjaja’s site (netregistry) said that Widjaja’s business had been scuttled due to a "completely arbitrary decision" by the regulator. He said that the original mistake occurred during the 21-day "lapse" period when domains becomes deregistered and returns to the marketplace if its owner hasn't renewed it with auDA According to Fenton, the domain name was not being used at the time, and since being revoked from Widjaja it has returned to dormancy. "You would have thought the CEO of auDA would try to mediate a sensible outcome, it's ludicrous that someone no longer using the domain should complain and cause this to happen," he said. Fenton continued: "Why wasn't a service alert sent to the registrars 12 months ago and an attempt made to reconcile the registration and renewal dates?"

The director of the Cyberspace Law and Policy centre said it was potentially a failure in governance by auDA to have taken so long to discover the problem, and then to have given Widjaja "such an unreasonably short period to rectify matters". auDA representatives were not available for comment.