Internet NZ to spend more on regulation, lobbying politicians

By ADAM GIFFORD

Internet NZ wants to boost the amount it spends on legal and regulatory issues and on lobbying politicians.

Vice-president David Farrar said issues such as attempts to enforce patents on e-commerce processes had highlighted the need for the society to respond quickly.

"The feedback we are getting is no one else is doing these things, like making submissions to Parliament in this area, so we are keen to beef up our capacity so we can be more effective," Farrar said.

The draft business plan proposes that Internet NZ set aside up to $10,000 this year for commission of professional external help preparing parliamentary submissions, and $30,000 a year for the next two years. This work is at present being done by volunteers.

The society also wants to be able to provide logistical support and speakers as required for a bipartisan parliamentary internet caucus.

Farrar said the idea had been put informally to MPs from several parties.

The society also wanted to beef up the technical side of its activities.

"Internet NZ has been seen as a bit Wellington-policy focussed, and we intend to do more with things like IPv6 [the next generation of internet addresses], root servers and so on."

Internet NZ is flush with cash from the sale of its domain name registration business Domainz, from which it got a final dividend of $1.5 million, and it has assets of just over $2.8 million.

It intends to run down those assets by $1.3 million over the next three years by making sure the dividends it gets from .nz Registry Services, the company running the shared registry of .nz internet names, are lower than the society's expenditure.

This lower dividend will allow the .nz fee to be reduced. A 12.5 per cent reduction takes effect from July 1, and may be passed on to the nameholders by some registrars.

Expenditure for the 2004-2005 year is expected to be about $1.95 million, about half of which is the cost of running the office of the Domain Name Commissioner and other .nz related fees and meetings.

According to the business plan, $100,000 over the next year will be used to develop an internet code of practice, $60,000 for an anti-spam campaign, and smaller sums would be used to support the Internet Safety Group and the Next Generation Internet project.