Kia ora
In September, I travelled to Malaysia for ICANN75. The meeting — convened by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) — brought together stakeholders to discuss and develop policy and practice as it relates to the Domain Name System. The various participant communities each have their own work programs, and .nz is principally part of the CCNSO (Country Code Name Supporting Organisations), but many of the attendees were following the GNSO (Generic Name Supporting Organisations) streams of work related to top-level domain spaces that are not run by countries — for example, .com or .org.
The CCNSO sessions included updates on how different countries are promoting digital inclusion. It was new ground for me to hear about the experiences of communities who do not use Latin script and their efforts to have IDNs (Internationalised Domain Names) delegated. Related, there was discussion on the effects of the dominance of English on the internet and the difficulties that some communities experience accessing keyboards that use their own scripts. I note that .nz started supporting the characters ā, ē, ī, ō, and ū (which make up the .nz IDNs) in 2010.
We receive complaints of unauthorised transfer of domain names from time to time, so I followed with interest the session on transfer policy as well as the topical discussions on responding to DNS Abuse and access requests for registry data.
I came away with an increased understanding of potential issues that can arise, having made valuable contacts in what is an inherently global industry; and with new ideas about how to benchmark our work. This new knowledge will be invaluable as the Commission moves to review and refresh our compliance approach in the months ahead.
Ngā mihi
Isobel Egerton
Interim Domain Name Commissioner
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