Adam Gifford: NZ net guardianship in limbo

InternetNZ has an identity problem. Having created a robust, independent registry for ".nz" internet domain names, it's now asking, "what next?"

But its real problem, as it tries to create a strategic plan for the next three years, is credibility. Does it have any?

InternetNZ, previously known as the Internet Society of New Zealand, took over control of the .nz country code top level domain from Waikato University in stages between 1997 and 2000. It created a company, known as Domainz, to run the registry and sell new domain names.

This put Domainz, and therefore the society, at odds with the growing number of entrepreneurs who thought they could create businesses around selling domain names as well as other services such as website hosting and email.

It didn't helped that the system built for Domainz was plagued with technical problems and built with Microsoft technology - heresy to hardcore internet geeks.

The fight got rancorous and personal, and to cut a long and bitter story short, enough peeved-off competitors and consumers joined the society to vote out most of the executive and instigate the development of a shared registry.

The .nz name space was given a professional manager - the Domain Name Commissioner - and the society sold Domainz, which, stripped of its registry responsibility, became just another registrar among many.

InternetNZ last month banked almost $2 million from the sale of Domainz to what had been its Australian counterpart, Melbourne IT. That money has been invested to pay for further operations - although what those are remains blurred. It also collects a few dollars from every .nz domain name bought or renewed.

The third source of funds is membership, but since the society has only about 150 individual members paying $50 each a year and a further 30 or so corporate members paying a bit more, these fees would cover only tea and biscuits.

And there we have the problem. More than 2.5 million New Zealanders have access to the internet, but only 150 feel inclined to join the organisation which apparently exists to look out for the public-good aspects of the net here.

There are few benefits of membership - no discount card, no prizes, no free web space, hat or T-shirt - just the chance to argue by email, and perhaps serve on subcommittees wrestling with arcane or technical issues. And get abused for your efforts by geeks who think they are smarter or more righteous than you.

A common attitude among Auckland internet professionals is that InternetNZ is a Wellington "policy-wonk" organisation which doesn't have a role now that the registry problems are sorted out.

This is short-sighted. The internet is not a static entity and organisations and Governments are always looking to take over its control. An example this month was the attempt by Verisign, the company which runs the database of .com and .net names, adding a "wildcard" instruction to its internet root server which hijacked all mis-spelled or unassigned .com domain names to a search page it managed. The organisation with final responsibility for the internet, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), forced Verisign to remove the wildcard, but the threat has not gone away.

VeriSign chief executive Stratton Sclavos told news site CNet it was time for the internet infrastructure to move away from the volunteers who run the servers out of universities, and to go commercial.

There are threats coming from the government side as well. Some South American and African countries and China indicate they may use the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva in December to push for government control of internet infrastructure.

Other issues which InternetNZ president Keith Davidson says the society needs to work on include technical things such as contributing to the development and implementation of "DNSSEC", a new security layer for the domain name system; "IPv6", the next generation of the internet protocol standard; and "ENUM", the telephone number mapping protocol which will allow a telephone number to relate to a single IP address.

On the policy level, it could contribute to the debate over what to do about spam, domain-name hijacking, denial of service attacks, blocking, spoofing and copyright issues as they affect the internet. It might even complete the long-promised internet code of practice.

It can do a lot with only a small membership - internet governance is essentially a shell game, where a small number of lawyer or technical wizards such as Icann chairman Vint Cerf get to make decisions for the rest of us based on their confidence, skill in argument or contributions to the underlying technology.

In such an environment InternetNZ has built up respect, and the views of people such as Davidson and former president Peter Dengate-Thrush carry some weight.

But as in the Wizard of Oz, eventually someone - whether business interests or government - will demand to see what is behind the curtain. InternetNZ's plan doesn't say how one can prove a mandate when the challenge comes.

A good place to start would be to make all .nz nameholders into members which would increase membership a thousandfold. Actively communicating with those stakeholders wouldn't hurt either.

As it is, the 20-page dirge that is InternetNZ's strategic plan (www.internetnz.co.nz/members/strat-plan/strategic-plan030926.pdf) will not inspire people to flock to join, nor will it give the society its much-needed credibility boost.

* Email Adam Gifford