Another advantage of owning a .NZ domain name

Interesting piece of chatter on the Internet NZ mail list today. Apparently the US government has seized a Spanish owned .ORG domain name, despite the Spanish courts having ruled that what the company owning the name is doing is perfectly legal under Spanish law.

Long time readers of this and my other blogs will recall that I have long advocated owning the domain name with the extension most appropriate for your target market. Back in 2008 in Branding on the Internet I said you should have .co.uk for Britain, .com.au for Australia, .com for the USA and, of course, .co.nz for New Zealand, and I still stand by that advice. This judicial theft doesn't affect the logic of having the appropriate name for your target market, but does strengthen the message in those cases where you don't have a particular need for any given top level domain name. The Spanish company in question seem to have their name tied up in a number of registries and have just switched to another one.

.nz Dispute Resolution Service Policy Review

The Domain Name Commission (DNC) has announced a consultation on their Dispute Resolution Service that will run until the beginning of April this year.

They are proposing three minor changes

1. a change where the term Mediator will be defined,
2. Increase the fee for Expert determination from $1800 to $2000 (+GST)
3. Increase the fee for appeals of Expert determination from $6,600 to $7,200 (+GST)

All fairly innocuous, but the entire policy is up for review. It was last reviewed in 2007-2008, and at that time a couple of points were raised.

I'll probably make a submission and I'll be watching the review page and hope to report here on any significant developments

Expired or Not? The strange case of Dick Smiths

On Friday night Expired Domains was showing the auction on the domain name dicksmiths.co.nz as finishing then. From Saturday morning it's been showing as finishing in 2 months time.

More on IDNs

Since writing yesterday's entry on Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) I've done a bit more thinking.
Is there any history that gives a guideline as to what may happen?
Many, if not all, common Māori words are registered in the .co.nz space, and also in the .com world. The .com registry has permitted IDNs for a long time so I started investigating that. With the help of NZ History's 100 Maori words every New Zealander should know and a couple of other sites, I investigated a few common words.

• Māori: Maori.co.nz, Maori.com, and Māori.com all registered, but 3 different registrants
• Tāne: Tane.co.nz, Tane.com, and Tāne.com all registered, again 3 different registrants
• Pākehā: Pakeha.co.nz & Pakeha.com were registered, to two different registrants. (I've grabbed Pākehā.com)
• Waitematā: Waitemata.co.nz &Waitemata.com were registered, again to different registrants. (I regged Waitematā.com too)