Copping most flak was the decision to "delegate" level two domains to "a manager" who will represent "a well defined set of organisations".

What this means exactly, is not obvious. Will second level domains be put up for tender? Will the allocation be performed at the discretion of ISOCNZ and if so, what criteria will be used in the decision-making process?

The other move, which originally sparked cries of outrage when it was first mooted several months ago, is the decision by ISOCNZ to allow themselves to reserve domain names "for their own use". Although it is claimed that "this is specifically intended to allow for an orderly expansion of the level-two domain name space", there is no indication of why the reservations are a necessary part of this management process.

The questions posed by several people to Aardvark were "how can ISOCNZ implement policy without first releasing the draft for member approval and why aren't all the submissions which have been received being made public?"

Given the ready-access of the Net and the ease with which a democratic voting system could be implemented, why doesn't ISOCNZ put contentious issues such as changes to the domain name policies to a member-vote instead of "imposing" policy changes without even a draft approval phase?

Comments and corrections to any factual errors in this article are invited. Please include the words FOR PUBLICATION if you want your comments published.

Related stories:

Do you want to link to this page?