NZOC Monthly Report for November 2006

1. NZRS Report

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

• System availability for November was 99.97% against the SLA standard of 99.9%

Total downtime for the month was 18 minutes and 23 seconds. This was due to micro outages.

• There were two scheduled maintenance windows utilised over the month as part of the

continuing hardware upgrade (12^th & 26^th November).

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

• DNS SLA standards met

Server % Availability

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

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 1,691,000 to 1,568,000.

• The level of active .nz domain names increased from 252,928 to 257,872. An increase of 4,944.

2. .nz Policies and Procedures

2.1 Registrar Compliance

Correspondence on an issue being investigated is continuing between the DNC and the registrar.

2. Policy Reviews

• A second consultation paper regarding the review of the Registering, Managing and Cancelling Domain Names Policy has been published and public comments are being sought. The paper can be seen at http://dnc.org.nz/rmc-2ndconsult.

• In consultation with NZOC, and separate to the current review of the Registering, Managing and Cancelling Domain Names Policy, a change was made to the existing policy. This change was made to protect any policy decisions in implementing Internationalised Domain Names into the .nz space. It needed to be made without notice to ensure no registrations were undertaken once the matter was identified.

A clause was added to section 4, the structure of a domain name, and reads as follows: 4.2.5 Domain names commencing “xn--” are not permitted.

The technical background to this change is explained in detail in a supporting paper. This paper can be read in full at http://dnc.org.nz/content//idn-issues1-0.pdf.

2. Applications

• A number of applications for access to the zone file were received with all being declined after it was considered they did not reach the threshold required.

3. Registrar authorisation and connection

One registrar, SiteTech Solutions Limited, was authorised in November. No further registrars connected to the production environment over the month.

4. Other .nz matters

• Work to prepare for a hearing in relation to the legal action being taken against NZ Domain Registration Limited was undertaken. At the end of the month we were waiting on word from the judge as to likely timeframes for proceeding.

5. Dispute Resolution Service (DRS)

In the period 1 June to 30 November 2006 there were 51 electronic complaints lodged.

Total Invalid

June 11 3

July 6 4

August 12 6

September 7 1

October 5 3

November 10 -

Of these 17 (33%) were declared invalid leaving 34 complaints to progress through the system and by the end of November 24 disputes had been concluded leaving 10 ongoing.

Progress of live disputes as at 30 November:

With Expert 1

Waiting hard copy 5

Waiting response 4

Of the 34 valid complaints:

• 8 (24%) disputes settled prior to mediation on initial notification.

• 9 (26%) disputes went to mediation

In 7 disputes the parties reached agreement to settle and 2 did not.

Of the 2 unsuccessful mediations 1 went on to seek an Expert Determination and the other was withdrawn.

• 4 (12%) Disputes went on to an Expert with 3 domain names transferred and one dismissed.

6. DNC Office

• Recruitment of a replacement for Hilary Pope as Dispute Support Officer started during the month. Hilary is relocating to Motueka and plans to leave the office in the middle of January 2007.

• The DNC attended the APTLD meeting in Bangkok. A travel report is attached as Appendix 1.

7. Financial

Financial report as at the end of November 2006

Frank March

Chair, NZOC

Appendix 1

DNC Travel Report – APTLD Meeting

13 and 14 November 2006, Bangkok

The DNC attended the APTLD meeting in Bangkok. This was the final meeting for 2006 and was well attended with a number of ccTLD managers attending.

A copy of the agenda for the meeting is at http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/11_Bangkok/BangkokNotice.html

Monday 13 November 2006

The meeting started with an introduction and presentation by Professor Kanchana Kanchanasut of the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT). The AIT has established an ‘Interlab’ which is focused on Internet training issues and is meant to address the shortage of infrastructure personnel. A brief overview of how the organisation is structured and funded was provided.

http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/11_Bangkok/file/02-AIT-Introduction.pdf

APTLD are looking at using AIT to provide the technical training being planned for ccTLDs, as per the work undertaken by the Training Committee.

Dave Baker from NZRS is registered to attend a DNSSEC training course at AIT at the start of December. It will be useful to get feedback from Dave as to how he found the organisation and training at AIT.

Following the introduction, the meeting heard from A. Pensri – from .th (THNIC), the hosts for the meeting. A copy of her presentation can be seen at http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/11_Bangkok/file/03-th-update.pdf.

It was interesting to learn how .th was structured, with three separate divisions – the Policy Manager (THNIC – Thailand Network Information Center), the Registry (Thai Name Server Co. Ltd) and the Registrar (T.H.NIC Co. Ltd). There are a number of different government entities involved in THNIC, which specifies the .th registration policies. Seven 2LDs are operated with a local presence necessary and the .co.th restricted to those who are companies or have a trademark. There is a limit of one domain name per organisation and the names must be related. .th also has some ‘banned’ names.

These registration restrictions probably contribute to the relatively low level of registrations which were at 23,218 active domains as at 31 October 2006. This was a gain over the last year of 3,902. IDNs have been implemented in the .th space and registration of a .th IDN is free with the corresponding ASCII name.

There are plans to increase the registration channels by allowing for multiple registrars to increase competition and they are wanting to make .th more attractive so are looking at ways to do this (eg flatten structure). Currently they are still in the information gathering phase. Thai people tend to register in the gTLD space, mostly .com names with only approximately 18% of domain names registered by Thais being .th names.

The focus on Thailand at the start of the meeting continued with the next presentation given by Dr Chadamas Thuvasethakul – on ICT in Thailand (http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/11_Bangkok/file/04-ICT-in-Thailand.pdf ).

I liked the way the meeting focused on the host country and gave us all a chance to learn about how things operated where the meeting was being held and also allowed us to get familiar with the people who had done all the work for the meeting.

For the afternoon, the focus was on Internationalised Domain Names (IDN).

Tina Dam – ICANN started off the session by giving an overview of what IDN are, the various issues associated with them and the work being done by ICANN. Her presentation can be seen at (http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/11_Bangkok/file/05-IDN-Primer-ICANN.pdf ). The link to keep informed of what is happening at ICANN about IDN is http://www.icann.org/topics/idn/ .

Following that presentation, the meeting heard from Alireza Saleh – .ir who spoke about IDN and DNS – the realities of implementation, marketing and delivery. His presentation can be seen at http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/11_Bangkok/file/06-IDNs-and-DNS.pdf.

This presentation was interesting as it outlined how .ir (Iran) has undertaken its implementation of IDN into their name space. One of their features is a “bundle” which is generated automatically when a name is submitted during registration. The bundle incorporates Persian, Arabic-Indic and “European” scripts.

They have two methods for retrieving their WHOIS information – a web interface and WHOIS protocol. Both of these utilise Punycode with the Web Interface also Unicode. Any variant of a domain name can be queried.

.ir are finding so far that IDN domains are not popular in comparison with the ASCII registrations. Currently the rate of ASCII registrations is 62 times that of IDN registrations. One of the things they are offering is a free one year .ir registration per IDN equivalent registration.

There was time out from IDNs for a short session from Bart Mackay. Bart is from Verisign who manage the .tv and .cc ccTLDs. He spoke on the Commercial Issues of a ccTLD and the opportunities and experiences. It is an interesting situation with Verisign managing a ccTLD like .tv as they are specifically setting out to market the TLD to people outside of the “country” and have been contracted to make a return and benefit Tuvalu. Bart’s comments about how more than just the nationals might be interested in a ccTLD, and how that might be utilised, can be seen in how others have grown, for example .ws.

Tina Dam then gave a further presentation, this one with a focus on the policy issues for IDN implementation. IDN Lab testing goals include demonstrating that the insertion of IDNs doesn’t impact on the security and stability of the root. This presentation can be seen at http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/11_Bangkok/file/08-ICANN-IDN-Status-Update.pdf.

Another area of work being done is a IDNA Protocol Revision. This revision will base the protocol on Unicode 5.0, containing 64 scripts (currently based on Unicode 3.2 which contains 45 scripts). It will potentially increase the available blocks of characters, include an easier revision process to accommodate additional scripts in the future and include a technical review of protocol functionality.

RFC4690 published September 2006 defined the basic framework and raised some issues. Three drafts have recently been published which provide suggestions for solutions for these issues and links were provided to those.

An issue with IDN implementation is to utilise them in email programmes. .tw has been doing work on this and Liang Ming-Cheng outlined the work they have done to date with various email variants. Their presentation can be seen at http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/11_Bangkok/file/09-EAI-with-testbed-aptld-bangkok-2006.pdf.

The day finished with a presentation by Jordan Carter about the APTLD WIKI and how to add content. The WIKI is at http://aptld.org/mywiki.

Tuesday 14 November

Day two of the meeting mixed operational presentations and issues with APTLD administrative matters and the formal board meeting.

Presentations were given by Chris Disspain, .au, and Bart Mackay, .cc and .tv, about growth for ccTLDs. Though Bart’s presentation is not currently online, Chris’ is on the APTLD website at http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/11_Bangkok/file/12-growth-and-income-AUDA.pdf.

Chris gave some interesting insight into some of the decisions made when auDA was first established. They needed to get some money to fund the costs of setting up the new structure and the auction for generic .au names assisted in achieving that goal. Though most of the generic names sold for around $200-$300 they had sufficient domain names of demand that obtained a premium that they made a lot of money. It was flowers.com.au that had the highest fee paid for it at $156,000.

Though .au relaxed its registration policy a bit for .com.au names, by introducing its “close and substantial connection” rule, they decided to maintain the Australian requirement for registering a .au name as they didn’t want to lose their identity. The presentation also referred to the new auDA initiative of “Lets Talk Net” which provides information on general Internet information like email, websites etc.

Bart’s presentation referred to statistics from Verisign. He commented on the different philosophies on the part of ccTLD registries in generating growth and that empirical evidence has established that onerous registration and other policies adversely affect growth. What was said in Bart’s presentation is supported by what has been seen when ccTLDs relax their registration restrictions, for example .in (India).

Shariya Haniz Zulkifi , .my, gave a presentation on the different approaches to residency requirements by registrars and registrants and what, if any, correlation this has with the number of domain name registrations.

They selected a few different ccTLDs and gathered information on what their registration rules were regarding residency. They then measured this against the population and the number of domain name registrations. Their general conclusion from the research was that the stricter the requirements and level of proof, on registrants, the smaller the number of domain names in the ccTLD appeared to be.

This presentation can be seen at http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/11_Bangkok/file/Residency-requirements.pdf.

CoCCA is the Council of Country Code Administrators and has been set up to assist smaller ccTLDs by enabling a mechanism to share policies, administration and other requirements in managing a ccTLD (http://www.cocca.cx/). Garth Miller outlined how this operated and the latest initiatives CoCCA is working on, including a Complaint Resolution Service.

These presentations were followed by a panel discussion where various issues impacting on ccTLDs were discussed. Topics discussed included:

• Price – how much does it influence registrations

• National identity and policies

• Growth

• Registrars - who is attracted to your ccTLD

A number of member updates were then given. These included:

- Jonathan Shea - .hk

- Debbie Monahan - .nz

- Gihan Dias - .lk

- Yumi Ohashi - .jp

- Ching Chiao - .asia

- Lee Humphries - .sb

Savenaca Vocea introduced himself as the new ICANN Regional Liaison for Australasia/Pacific Islands. There are now six Regional Liaison positions filled (Europe, Middle East, Africa, Canada and Caribbean, Latin America and Australasia/Pacific Islands). The positions yet to be filled are for Asia and for India, Russia and the ‘stans’.

There was a general update on IANA and the root zone management process improvements being undertaken. Save’s presentation is on the APTLD website at http://aptld.org/meeting/2006/11_Bangkok/file/18-aptld-iana-update-nov06.pdf.

At the conclusion of that presentation, the meeting started on the administrative matters including all the committee reports and working through to the board meeting.

Of most interest to me was the paper from the Training Committee. Nick Griffin and I contributed to the content of the technical and non-technical training that APTLD is proposing to set up. It was agreed that AIT would be approached with a view to offering the technical training out of their facilities, with the non-technical training being undertaken by APTLD members. The first non-technical training is planned to take place in conjunction with the February meeting. I would recommend .nz contribute how we can to this training session.

Overall, I found this APTLD meeting to be informative and interesting. There was a greater focus on operational issues than that at previous meetings, especially with the IDN sessions. I look forward to future meetings that also offer good operational subjects for discussion.

Debbie Monahan

Domain Name Commissioner