Domain names in for shakeup

By ADAM GIFFORD

The new board of Domainz meets this week to start reorganising the company that runs the internet domain name system in this country.

The Domainz AGM this month threw out all but one of the directors, James Scott.

The new board members include Clearview founder Robert Gray, Keith Davidson and Roger De Salis.

Domainz is owned by the Internet Society of New Zealand (Isocnz), and the purge followed a similar one at the Isocnz annual meeting, at which critics of the society's executive encouraged dozens of new members to join and then used their proxies to vote out those councillors up for re-election.

The meeting voted to adopt the recommendations of a working party led by Professor John Hine, of Victoria University, that the .nz country code top-level domain move to a shared registry system (SRS).

However, there is confusion about how that will work in practice, particularly because the meeting also passed a motion from former Isocnz councillor David Farrar that Domainz specifically be excluded from running the registry, which records where .nz internet addresses live in cyberspace.

Professor Hine said Mr Farrar's motion "was a bit premature, but that was the decision made."

" We've got to work in the framework set by the AGM."

He said the SRS working party's final report should be completed and released for public submissions by the end of September.

Mr De Salis, one of the new Domainz board members, said that until the working group recommendations were released, it would be business as usual running the domain name system.

"It's clear some of the [Isocnz] motions were to do with large-scale changes.

"We now have to work out what is sensible to do."

Mr De Salis said that if some of the changes being sought were not practical, the Domainz board might have to go back to the shareholder, Isocnz, to ask it to modify the policy.

The debate over the structure of the registry goes to the heart of control and use of the internet in this country.

At present, Domainz has two types of customers: internet service providers such as ihug, Clear and Xtra - which register large numbers of names as a service to customers - and smaller individual registrants, people with enough technical skill to configure an internet server on their own behalf.

While having only a few large customers doing all the registering would simplify billing and allow the registry to run at lower cost, it could entrench the position of those in the market.

There are also fears that the changes could lock people in to the ISPs they use to register their internet names, rather than allowing them to move freely for reasons of price or service.

Mr De Salis said Domainz was set up on a not-for-profit, cost-recovery basis, but the explosion of domain names meant "it's obvious Domainz is making large profit."

The new board will consider this, as well as implement a requirement from the Isocnz annual meeting to review the rollout of the new Domainz registry system, which was plagued by technical glitches.

Mr De Salis said those problems were a major reason the board was changed.

In the year to March 31, Domainz reported after-tax earnings of $689,000, compared with $451,000 in 1999.

The number of domain name registrations almost doubled from 28,904 the previous year to 56,794.

Domainz chief executive Patrick O'Brien said the company had faced a lot of criticism for doing things it was required to by the shareholder.

"The issues come down to how Domainz is called a registrar," Mr O'Brien said.

"We do allow people who are technically clued up to register names. Isocnz policy requires us to do that.

"Since 1996 it has been council policy to give full and fair and equal access to everyone.

"We do bill. That is a policy issue."