June 2018
Cyber Security – a joint effort
The Domain Name Commission and CERT NZ have announced an agreement to share some domain registration information to help enhance cyber-security in New Zealand. The agreement comes in the form of a Memorandum of Understanding between the two organisations. CERT NZ will use its access to international cyber threat and vulnerability information, together with withheld domain name registration information to alert domain owners in the .nz space to cyber security issues.
The full press release, including comments from both Brent Carey, Domain Name Commissioner and Rob Pope, Director, CERT NZ can be found in our news section.
The Domain Name Commission has also been participating in the Cyber Security Strategy Refresh. In April, Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media Minister, Hon Clare Curran, announced a refresh of New Zealand’s Cyber Security Strategy and Action Plan. The first of these workshops started this month. Cyber Security is an area with many stakeholders, and we encourage anyone interested to participate to contact Connect Smart.
Attendance at CENTR and ICANN 62 Panama
As part of our on-going collaboration and sharing of information with our counter-parts internationally, the Domain Name Commissioner recently attended the 2018 CENTR Jamboree. Check out the guest blog on InternetNZ’s website for the perspective of a guy from Opunake at a European-centric domain name conference.
Highlights from the ICANN 62 conference:
- The Strategic Outlook Trends Identification Session – a way for ICANN attendees to engage in looking forward and identifying future challenges. This session involved re-evaluating challenges identified by the ICANN board in 2016. Attendees broke into groups, and brainstormed whether the challenges remained relevant, and whether other trends should be added to the list.
- A series of vigorous discussions on the topic of WHOIS dominated Day 2 of ICANN 62. With such a wide range of stakeholders represented, there was significant variance in the types of concerns aired in the sessions. The implementation of GDPR has made waves in the industry, and the community’s collaboration on WHOIS and associated issues is more important than ever.
- The topic of emoji use in domain names was covered on Day 3, with the Council of the Supporting Organisations for country code TLDs (ccNSO) and the Council of generic top level domains (gNSO) holding a joint session. ccNSO already have a dedicated Working Group to explore emoji use.
For more on ICANN 62, the Domain Name Commissioner has been logging his experiences at the event on twitter – follow @nzdnc and #ICANN62 for updates.
Conflicted Names
18 October last year was the deadline for parties involved in a domain name conflict to lodge a preference. Following this deadline, parties who had not lodged a preference were removed from their respective conflict set. This saw the total conflict sets drop sharply from 13,000 to 2,534
Those still involved are encouraged to negotiate with the other registrant(s) if they want the shorter version of their current domain name. To help resolve these conflicts, the DNC’s Conflict Resolution Facilitator Kimberly is able to work with registrants to seek a suitable resolution. If you are involved in a conflict set, please contact us about our free conflict resolution service.
For those who are ‘self-conflicted’ (they are the only ones in the conflict set) .nz policy now requires you to register the domain name, or release it back to market for general registration on a first-come, first-served basis. The Domain Name Commission will be following up with these registrants shortly to ensure that they are abiding by .nz policy.
Privacy Compliance Program
In our previous newsletters we gave an update on the work we were doing around privacy which included GDPR compliance, and .nz Authorised Registrars proving the Individual Registrant Privacy Option (IRPO).
The Domain Name Commission will be ensuring that all .nz Authorised Registrars are complaint with these, by working collaboratively with Registrars using a newly developed compliance program.
Industry News
The marketing practices of two domain name registrars attracted the ire of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission resulting in $1.95M in penalties for breaching Australian Consumer Law. Domain Corp Pty Ltd and Domain Name Agency Pty Ltd issued around 300,000 unsolicited notices to businesses regarding the re-registration of domain names between 2015 and 2017. While appearing as renewal invoices for existing domain names, the invoices sent were actually for the registration of a new domain name.
The Australian Federal Court found that the companies made false and misleading representations and engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct in carrying out the marketing campaign. Read the full article.
If a similar situation were to emerge in the .nz market, the DNC would cooperate with the Commerce Commission, who performs a similar role to the ACCC around investigations into misleading and deceptive conduct.
Friendly Reminder
Last but not least, we encourage everyone with a .nz domain name to check their registration details, or do so on behalf of someone they know. Outdated registration details can lead to number of issues, such as reminders going to the wrong person, disruptions to any email or website hosted on that domain name, or even just having an old phone number listed. Use the .nz query service to do so, as it is the authoritative source of registration information.
