NZOC Monthly Report for June 2006

1. NZRS Report

NZRS have produced their monthly report for May 2006. Main points NZOC would like to highlight with Council are:

• System availability for June was 99.8% against the SLA standard of 99.9%

There were no major incidents affecting availability with the 6 minutes and 59 seconds unavailability due to micro outages.

• The scheduled maintenance window was utilised on 25 June 2006

• Performance times for key transactions for June are in the following table:

• DNS SLA standards met

Server % Availability

*NS6 did not respond to TCP queries for a period of 34 minutes and 15 seconds between 07:33:06 and 08:07:21 on 8 June. NS5 continued to respond throughout this period so there was no degradation of the Ultra DNS service.

Performance Stress testing

The figures are derived from the 'stress testing' of the name servers. 1201 UDP and 121 TCP transactions are used. Measurements are in milli-seconds.

The measurements for the Primary name servers and NS1, NS2 and NS3 are taken by running the programme on the individual servers.

SRS Zone Pushes

No issues have been reported with the zone pushes.

These figures show the average time taken from the point that the first Primary begins the zone push to the time that the last of the secondary’s acknowledges that it is up to date.

• The total number of WHOIS queries decreased from 1,870,000 to 1,862,000

• The level of active .nz domain names increased from 230,531 to 235,196. An increase of 4,665.

2. .nz Policies and Procedures

2.1 Registrar Compliance

No major compliance issues were identified during June.

1. Policy Reviews

There are currently no reviews being undertaken

2.3 Applications

No applications were received under the Zone Transfer Policy and no applications for a new Second Level Domain were received.

3. Registrar authorisation and connection

There were no new authorisations, or connections to production, in June.

4. Other .nz matters

• With the implementation of the Dispute Resolution Service (see below) on 1 June 2006 the .nz policy framework is complete. Ongoing reviews of the policies will continue to take place with the next review expected to start in August and cover the Registering, Managing and Cancelling policy.

5. Dispute Resolution Service (DRS)

• The DRS was implemented as planned on 1 June 2006. The first complaint was filed before 10am that morning and over the course of the month a number of complaints were received, illustrating there was a demand for the service.

6. DNC Office

• The DNC Office contributed to the InternetNZ Annual Report. The report is in a similar format to last year with the .nz information one side and the general InternetNZ information the other. It will be available online shortly.

• A travel report from the DNC is attached as Appendix 1.

7. Financial

Frank March

Chair, NZOC

Appendix 1

DNC Travel – June 2006

APTLD Meeting – Hong Kong

Tuesday 20 June 2006

The agenda for the meeting is at http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/06_HongKong/agenda.htm. This page also includes links to the various presentations given and documents discussed.

Key decisions and discussions included:

• IDN Committee Report

An overview of work done by the IDN Committee, including information on workshops and who involved in the work was given by TWNIC.

28 May 2006 gNSO issued paper re policy issues for IDN at top level. There is a joint ccNSO and gNSO working party on IDNs and they will be meeting initially in Morocco.

• Training

A survey of ccTLD in the Asia-Pacific region was undertaken in May. The results of this had been collated (http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/06_HongKong/file/SURVEY-training.pdf) and were discussed.

One point of interest was the response from non-members of APTLD saying they wanted training in the various topics raised as part of the survey. This would indicate that offering training opportunities would be beneficial and a potential reason for ccTLDs to join APTLD.

A way forward was discussed and it was agreed that the Training Group would go through the results and design a syllabus, with possible topics within each. This would then be brought back to APTLD.

• IGF update

Chris Disspain updated what was happening with the IGF forum and the advisory group that had been set up – government, civil society, and the rest (ccTLD, ISOC etc).

Met in Geneva for a few days a few weeks ago and managed to ensure the meeting was held in an open environment. Next meeting is in Athens at end of October for four days.

Key links:

http://www.intgovforum.org/

Outline of meeting planned for Athens: http://www.intgovforum.org/athens_outline.htm

• ccNSO Accountability Frameworks

Donna Austin gave a presentation about the AF and Exchange of Letters options for ccTLDs formalising their relationships with ICANN.

• Member presentations

Presentations were given by:

.hk http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/06_HongKong/file/hk-update.pdf

http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/06_HongKong/file/hk-restricted-names.pdf

.sg http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/06_HongKong/file/sg-update.pdf

.my http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/06_HongKong/file/my-srs-issues.pdf

.kr http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/06_HongKong/file/SRS-Monitoring-System.jpg

These presentations covered areas such as managing sensitive names, and what monitoring was done by ccTLDs, through to options for a shared registry system and issues around registrar authorisation and any restrictions or regulations.

A valuable part of APTLD meetings is the sharing of different models by ccTLD managers. The presentations given in Hong Kong demonstrated that even experienced ccTLDs have questions they wish to answer such as the topics around ineligible domain names and how to manage when some get registered in error, moving to a shared registry system and what restrictions, if any, should be placed on who can be registrars. No one model is going to suit all ccTLD managers but learning how various options are operating elsewhere can be very valuable.

• General manager appointment

Don Hollander appointed as the APTLD General Manager.

The Secretariat went through the process for appointing the APTLD General Manager, http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/06_HongKong/file/2006-06-GM-report.pdf and there was a discussion about what the meeting wanted the GM to do, and how to measure success. This first session on the GM was done without the GM being present as he was due to arrive that night.

Wednesday 21 June

The day commenced with the introduction of the new General Manager – Don Hollander.

Don outlined his qualifications and experience and then asked some questions of the APTLD members including ‘who do you want as next members and why, and why haven’t they joined already?’ His presentation can be seen at http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/06_HongKong/file/DonHollander.pdf

There followed a discussion about work that APTLD can do to increase membership, where to focus and what to do, also about the training modules being planned.

Miscellaneous:

The opportunity was taken to speak to Chris Disspain, in his role as ccNSO Chair, about InternetNZ’s view that an independent secretariat for the ccNSO was desirable, rather than having ICANN staff fill the role.

ICANN

Marrakesh, Morocco

Attendance at the ICANN Morocco meeting was cut short due to the tragedy involving Peter Dengate Thrush’s family. While in Morocco, sessions were attended until leaving to return to New Zealand.

Sunday 25 June 2006

Security and Stability

The agenda for the session is at http://www.icann.org/meetings/marrakech/ssac-agenda.html with the real time captioning available at http://www.icann.org/meetings/marrakech/captioning-ssac-25jun06.htm

Titled Renewal Considerations for Domain Name Registrants, the first presentation addressed the issue of names being cancelled and then on release being registered by another entity on the secondary market. Matters raised included a number of aspects that we are also seeing in the .nz space, for example the consequence of not keeping details current and so the registrant can’t be contacted about the need to renew, also that the name that you’ve been using can be attractive on the secondary market due to the links already in place through search engines etc and the chance to make money through ‘pay per click’ setups.

This presentation was followed by one that spoke about how a domain name can be affected by the registration status of another name where it is associated with a DNS nameserver. This has been identified as a major contributor to lame delegations.

Colin Jackson and I left the session early to meet with Paul Twomey and Paul Levins of ICANN. Colin has commented on this meeting in his report.

IDN Workshop

An overview of the content of this workshop can be found on the ICANN website at http://www.icann.org/meetings/marrakech/idn-workshop-jun06.htm with the captions available at http://www.icann.org/meetings/marrakech/captioning-idn-ws-26jun06.htm.

This session started with a good, basic overview of what IDNs are, how they work and what issues they raise. http://about.museum/idn/tutorial.html

Some useful links for IDN material include:

www.gnu.org/software/libidn/

www.icann.org/topics/idn

www.unicode.org/reports/tr36

IDNs are currently being looked at by the GNSO and the GNSO Council Chair, Bruce Tonkin, gave an overview of the work done to date.

The preliminary policy issues report is available at http://gnso.icann.org/issues/idn-tlds/issues-report-28may06.htm Online comments are welcome and were to be discussed during the session. Comments on the report can be posted to idn-tlds-comments@icann.org and viewed at http://forum.icann.org/lists/idn-tlds-comments.

Monday 26 June 2006

Welcome Ceremony

Morocco’s Prime Minister opened the conference and spoke about the ICT investment for Morocco. A significant amount of work is going in to schools and business to ensure effective use of technology.

Vint Cerf responded. He also announced that he had bad news and formally recorded the events affecting Peter Dengate Thrush. Vint announced that ICANN will be making available forms, books etc for people to make comment and will send it to Peter. He also commented that Peter was accompanied back to New Zealand by his good friend Keith Davidson so ‘we know he’s in good hands’. A difficult situation expressed very well by Vint Cerf.

It was announced at the opening ceremony that Paul Twomey had been reappointed for three years. Quipped that clause 6.1d allows the board to remove the CEO if he becomes mentally unable to fill the role. Vint joked that by accepting another term, Paul had probably already fulfilled the requirement of that clause.