NZOC Monthly Report for October 2007

NZRS Report

NZRS have produced their monthly report for October 2007.  Points NZOC would like to highlight with Council are:

§                System availability for October was 99.99% against the SLA standard of 99.9%

Total unscheduled outage time of 2 minutes 16 seconds, as micro outages.

§                The scheduled maintenance window was utilised on 28 October 2007.

§                Performance times for key transactions for October 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 increased from 2,934,000 to 3,300,000.

§              The level of active .nz domain names increased from 300,397 to 305,446.  An increase of 5,049.

.nz Policies and Procedures

2.1       Registrar Compliance

§                No major compliance issues with registrars were identified in October

2.2              Policy Reviews

§                A third consultation paper on the Registering, Managing and Cancelling Domain Names Policy has been published for comments.  A copy of this paper can be seen at http://dnc.org.nz/content//Third_Consultation_Paper.pdf.  Submissions are published at http://dnc.org.nz/rmc-3rdconsult and consultation closes on Monday 12 November.

2.3              Applications 

§                No applications for a new second level domain, or for access to the zone file, were received during October.

Registrar authorisation and connection

§                No registrars were authorised or connected to the production environment over October.

Other .nz matters

§                Consultation on the possible implementation of IDNs into the .nz domain name space started in October.  The consultation paper, together with published submissions received, can be read at http://www.dnc.org.nz/idn-consult.  The first submission was received the same day as the consultation paper was published and at the time of writing, six submissions had been received.  Consultation closes on 19 December.

Dispute Resolution Service (DRS)

Of the eleven complaints submitted this month, none were deemed invalid.  This is only the third time that this has happened since the DRS commenced in June 2006 (other times were November 2006 and March 2007).  The full DRS statistics are viewable at http://www.dnc.org.nz/drs/index.php?clsid=1011

6.         DNC Office   

§                The DNC attended the APTLD meeting in Bangkok and the ICANN meeting in Los Angeles in October.  A copy of the DNC’s travel report can be seen in Appendix 1.

7.         Financial

Financial information for October 2007:

Notes:

§                High expenditure in Professional Services is due to the .nz market insurance being paid

§                There were three pays in October, resulting in the personnel costs being over budget for the month

Richard Currey

NZOC Chair

Appendix 1

DNC Travel Report

APTLD – Bangkok and ICANN – Los Angeles

APTLD Bangkok October 24 and 25

The final APTLD meeting for 2007 was held in Bangkok with a wide range of participants, many of who were continuing on to attend the ICANN meeting in Los Angeles the following week.  A range of different topics were discussed over the two days and the agenda for the meeting can be seen at http://aptld.org/bangkokOctober2007/0-APTLD%20BKK%20Program%20v%20Final.pdf

Some of the presentations given at the meeting are summarised in this report.  Copies of the full presentations are available online at http://aptld.org/bangkokoctober2007.htm.

Following the introductory talks from the hosts, Thailand, the meeting heard about the progress in DotAsia and their timetable for the sunrise periods prior to the general launch.  DotAsia have completed the first stage of sunrise covering governmental reserved names (with 4,525 names reserved following government consultation around Asia).  They are continuing their sunrise process with registered trademarks, followed by registered entity names (company names for example).

There are a few interesting aspects to how DotAsia is being established.  They are allowing applications online with submission of documentary evidence required on request.  Another thing is that they have introduced a “Charter Eligibility Requirement” which means that one of the domain contacts associated with the domain name (registrant, admin, technical, billing) must be a legal entity (includes individuals) in the DotAsia community where the community includes the ICANN Asia region, Australasia and the Pacific.  They also have a ‘new’ contact – the Operations and Notifications contact.  This contact may be nominated by the registrant and it may be the registrar who fulfils this role.

Within the APTLD membership, there is a range of different policies and approaches.  Some registries have local presence requirements and, even within those there are different processes used in respect of information and evidence.  The different systems were demonstrated in a presentation given by Yeo Yee Ling from Malaysia following a survey completed by 15 members (10 did not respond).  Nearly every question saw a range of responses with no question having a unanimous answer.  The results of the survey are in the presentation at http://aptld.org/bangkokOctober2007/9-MembersSurvey%20-%20slides.pdf.

There was another presentation relating to a survey of APTLD, this time regarding whether price makes a difference to domain name demand.  In essence, the result was that the price of a domain name was not significant in respect of growth of registrations.  Other factors, such as the number of internet users, were more likely to impact on the number of ccTLD registrations. 

It was also noted that policy decisions could make a difference.  For example, allowing registrations at the second level had a positive effect in opening up the ccTLD and increasing registrations.  Allowing IDN registrations however, did not have a statistically significant impact on the number of registrations (this point is interesting given APTLD has a large number of non ASCII scripts, with many able to be registered in ccTLD names such as .kr, .cn, .jp, .th, .hk etc.

Another finding was that domain buyers are more price sensitive in developed than developing countries and this sensitivity to price increases as price increases.  This can be seen at http://aptld.org/bangkokOctober2007/15-APTLD-10-22-2007-FINAL.pdf

A pleasing development at the Bangkok meeting was the presence of representatives from CNNIC, China.  China was previously involved in APTLD but hadn’t contributed for a while and had not kept their membership active.  CNNIC rejoined APTLD and has also joined the ccNSO so it is good to see China getting involved again in the ccTLD community.

A presentation from .cn was given setting out the work being done in China, particularly on IDNs and their use but also Internet Keywords, which is an alternative to .cn domain names and which are proving popular as they allow users to map to a specific webpage deep into a website.  Internet Keywords are a mapping technique so don’t support applications like email and work only when there is an established URL.   More information can be seen on the CNNIC site at  http://cnnic.cn/en/index/index.htm.

On behalf of the .nz registry, NZRS, I gave a presentation on the results of a benchmarking survey undertaken.  Unfortunately only 7 responses were received to the initial survey, limiting the value of the results received.  As a result of the presentation, two further ccTLD managers completed the survey.  What the limited results did show is that there is a wide diversity in the location of name servers, both within and between ccTLDs.  It also showed that anycast is becoming a popular option for name servers and that not a lot of work is being done yet on IPv6.  http://aptld.org/bangkokOctober2007/8-Registry%20Benchmarking%20Survey%20Oct%202007%20for%20APTLD.pdf

In addition to hearing from .cn, member updates this meeting were also from .np (Nepal), .lk (Sri Lanka), .sg (Singapore) and .as (American Samoa).  As in other meetings, these presentations demonstrated the different approaches to registration requirements, cost of domain names (free in Nepal if have a local presence) and interesting initiatives like Singapore offering a seamless registration of a .sg domain name at the same time when register a company.  This initiative is to be launched in December 2007.

ICANN meeting – Los Angeles

Details about the ICANN meeting, including agendas and links to presentations and transcripts, can be obtained through http://losangeles2007.icann.org/schedule-today.  As can be seen from the agenda, there are a number of parallel sessions, often with interesting topics overlapping.  My focus for the ICANN meeting was the ccNSO meetings, including the Technical day, and the two day general meeting.  While these were on, other interesting meetings were held in other arenas.  It was good that the timing of these allowed the DNC team back in NZ to listen and view some sessions via the webcasts and online transcripts.

The ccNSO and the GAC (Government Advisory Committee) continued their current practice of organising shared sessions. The first of these was on the Sunday to discuss IDNs and the fast track approach proposal from the ccNSO to try and ensure some ccTLD managers get to use IDNs as soon as practical.  Under the fast track proposal, a ccTLD would be able to use one IDN relatively quickly, while the broader policy for wider use is developed. 

Some members of the GAC do have concerns about a few aspects of the fast track proposal, particularly when it is not easy for a country or territory to select just one IDN for initial use.  This issue is acknowledged but the fast track approach is not the final product, just a way of ensuring some quick pickup and use of IDN by countries that it is a major issue for such as China, Taiwan, Saudia Arabia.  The fast track approach, proposed by APTLD, has received support from CENTR (Europe) and AfTLD (Africa).

In a recent survey done by the ccNSO, there was widespread support for the approach including Arabic, Greek, Asians.  GAC considers IDN implementation to be an important issue and acknowledges that the formal policy development process is likely to be lengthy so there is general support for the fast track approach.  As part of progressing this, it is proposed that a joint working group be established to work through the issues.

In it’s communiqué for the Los Angeles meetings, GAC stated “The GAC reaffirms support in principle to the possibility of a fast track approach and welcomes the proposal of the ccNSO Council to create an IDN working group. The GAC will actively engage in the process.”  Things are well underway and it will be good to see how they progress in the next 6-8 months.

For the last few meetings, the ccNSO has arranged a technical day with the focus purely on things technical rather than policy or general operations.  This day is generally a bit of a challenge for a non-techie but the speakers clearly know their subjects and typically make their presentations widely understandable.

The focus was on DNS with a range of speakers talking about how they build software and manage their name servers and DNS.  One of the presentations was from Verisign (.com/net) and some of the figures were just amazing.  Verisign serves more than 20 billion requests per day, with spikes of activities many times that volume.  They could see that BIND wasn’t going to be able to deliver so developed ATLAS which provides the framework for seven resolution services and infrastructure for a further half dozen services with zone updates applied every 15 seconds (prior to that it was twice daily) and periodic dumps of the entire database.  CommunityDNS and Packet Clearing House also provided overviews of how their DNS services operated.

Elaine Pruis of CoCCA spoke about an open source registry tool that had been developed by CoCCA members, with the code being written in New Zealand.  Its target is registries with 100 to 100,000 names and it allows registrar access via EPP and a web based GUI – use either or both.  The software can be downloaded from http://trac.cocca.org.au and it was demonstrated during the day by having it downloaded onto a notebook which then processed over 4,000 ‘registrations’ submitted by participants.  This was a useful demonstration covering a number of different aspects and, once a few bugs are sorted out, this could be a very valuable tool for smaller registries, particularly with the EPP interface which will appeal to more global registrars.

An IANA update started the ccNSO meeting with an overview of the work done to add 11 new domains to the root to test various aspects of IDNs in the root.  These are expected to be removed as production TLDs are introduced.  Kim Davies also spoke about DNSSEC and how IANA has been test signing the root for a while now.  Refer https://ns.iana.org/dnssec/status.html.  Kim’s presentation can be seen at http://losangeles2007.icann.org/files/losangeles/presentation-ccnso-iana-updates-davies-30oct07.pdf

DNSSEC was the subject of a survey undertaken by the ccNSO.  Results from the survey showed that most ccTLDs were aware of DNSSEC and had plans to implement it at some time in the future.  Reasons for not implementing yet included the zone walking issue and no IEFT standard yet passed that addresses that, and also that the root zone was not yet signed.  Though IANA, for example, does not consider that signing the root should be on the critical path for DNSSEC implementation, a number of ccTLDs consider that it is important before they will implement.  Nominet, .uk, published a paper at the time of the Los Angeles meeting recommending that IANA signed the root (http://www.nominet.org.uk/digitalAssets/25692_Signing_the_Root.pdf). Results of the survey are at http://ccnso.icann.org/surveys/dnssec-survey-report-2007.pdf.

DNS Security and Stability is a key item and this was demonstrated by the second shared session with the GAC being on this subject.  The presentations covered different types of attacks and also covered the work done in Sweden on their implementation of DNSSEC.

Related to this area was a presentation by Rod Rasmussen of the Anti-Phishing Working Group – www.antiphishing.org.  He covered current phishing methods and raised a number of concerns about how the actions of registries can allow the activity to continue.  Though there wasn’t any disagreement with his view that the only way to kill it is to go after the domain name, there were issues with the ccTLD managers about his expectations of being able to cancel the domain name without notice etc.  Like .nz, most ccTLD managers do not get involved in the use of a domain name and phishing is an area where people would like to do something to assist but are restricted by the policies in place and their inability to act in such situations.

It was noted that a lot of the methods used by phishing, as highlighted in the presentation, rely a lot on ‘real time’ dynamic updates to the DNS.  Currently .nz does not offer dynamic updates, instead doing them on the hour, every hour.  With the issues raised in the talk, there doesn’t appear to be any reason why .nz should increase its frequency of updates, indeed there is evidence that we are better to leave it as it is currently to prevent people regularly updating the name servers used in phishing scams.

One of the recommendations to come out of this presentation was to increase monitoring and reporting on updating name servers for .nz domain names.  NZRS will be asked to put this in place.

At a time when the DNC is consulting on whether registration restrictions should be introduced into the .nz domain name space, it was interesting to listen to a presentation by Hilde Thunem on domain name policies around the world.  This showed that there was a trend towards ccTLDs relaxing some of their restrictions and increasing either the range of those who can register, or the number and types of names they can register.  The results of Hilde’s survey on the registration policies of various ccTLDs is at http://losangeles2007.icann.org/files/losangeles/Domainnamepolicymodels-ccnso2007(2).pdf

It was another interesting, and useful, ccNSO meeting.  It is likely that IDNs will continue to occupy time on agendas into the future.  It was agreed at the ccNSO council meeting that a formal policy development process will commence on the IDN issue.  The first stage of this is for an Issues Report to be produced.  The first draft of this is to be completed by February 2008, two weeks before the ICANN meeting to be held in New Delhi.  This will address the issues in the “Questions and Issues” paper on IDNs which is being jointly developed by the GAC and the ccNSO. 

While a lot of good work was done through the week, there were two highlights of note.

On Monday 29 October, InternetNZ signed an Exchange of Letters with ICANN.  This has now formalised our relationship and our delegation of the .nz space.  The .nz letters can be seen at http://www.icann.org/cctlds/nz/nz-icann-letters-29oct07.pdf.

The second highlight of the Los Angeles ICANN meeting was on Friday 2 November at the second Board Meeting.   It was there that Peter Dengate Thrush was appointed Chair of ICANN.  Congratulations Peter.  ICANN is in good hands and we look forward to working with you and ICANN in the years ahead.