2007 NPP Meeting - 6 March 2007
First Meeting
6 March 2007, 2.00-5.00pm
Rydges Carlton Hotel, Melbourne
Present:
Philip Argy, Michael Bouy, Darrell Burkey, Grace Chu Te, Simon Delzoppo, Brett Fenton, Peter Firminger, Sally Foreman, David Goldstein, Graham Ingram, Amin Kroll, Jo Lim, Andrew McCullough, Bennett Oprysa, George Pongas, Holly Raiche, Tony Steven, Bruce Tonkin, Derek Whitehead, Alex Woerndle
Teleconference:
Kim Heitman, Jeff Marr, Jamie Murphy, Paul Szyndler
Apologies:
Bruce Arnold
Actions:
• DW and JL to follow up suggested research questions.
• DW and JL to frame the next meeting’s agenda to allow discussion of all three issues in the Terms of Reference.
• JL to circulate auDA survey questionnaire.
Discussion:
1. Welcome and introductions
Panel members introduced themselves and declared relevant interests.
2. Panel operating procedures
The Panel noted and agreed the operating procedures (attached).
The Panel further agreed that members may bring observers to a meeting, provided that the member gives reasonable notice and subject to meeting room capacity constraints. Observers must abide by the Panel’s operating procedures.
3. Introduction to .au domain space
JL gave a presentation covering the history of .au, the role of auDA and the specific auDA policies to be reviewed by the Panel.
4. Panel process and deliverables
The Terms of Reference require the Panel to undertake two public consultations before providing its final report to the auDA board. Previous Panels have released an issues paper for the first consultation, and draft recommendations for the second consultation.
5. auDA market research
JL advised that auDA has commissioned a survey of .au registrants and Internet users about the questions contained in the Terms of Reference. The survey method and questions are yet to be finalised. It is expected that initial survey results will be available for the Panel to consider at its next meeting, and there will be an opportunity for the Panel to request follow-up surveys if necessary.
It was suggested that resellers and large corporations should be included in the market research sample.
JL agreed to circulate the survey questionnaire to the Panel.
6. Panel Terms of Reference – general discussion of policies and issues
Apart from the market research being commissioned by auDA, the Panel will have access to statistical information from the AusRegistry database, eg. number of registrations, number of deletes, number of registrant transfers and so on.
Panel members suggested additional research questions that might be useful input to the review:
• What has been the experience of other TLDs in opening up to direct registrations, or choosing not to open up to direct registrations?
• Why do people choose to register in .com or another TLD instead of .au?
• What are the domain name penetration per capita rates for Australia and comparative countries?
• How many .com registrations have an Australian contact address?
• What is the general public’s understanding of “.au”?
• In TLDs with a secondary market, what effect has the secondary market had on the price of domain names?
• How do people navigate the Internet, and what do they expect to find?
Panel members also raised the following issues and concerns during discussion:
• Allowing people to register domain names directly under .au is not the same as creating new 2LDs. However, it would be technically possible for the registrant of a domain name under .au to set up a “pseudo 2LD” and offer 3LD registrations in their own registry. This type of activity could be addressed through policy rules and/or licence conditions.
• There are currently just over 700,000 com.au domain name registrations, compared with over 65 million .com registrations. This indicates that there is still ample room for growth in .com.au.
• Is an increase in the number of domain name registrations necessarily a good thing? There are other factors that should come into play in an assessment of “community benefit”.
• The review should address the use of domain names for illegal activity (eg. phishing, spam). It would be desirable for auDA and/or the registrar of record to have authority under the policy rules to delete domain names that are being used for illegal purposes.
• Opening up .au to direct registrations may cause panic and confusion among consumers. Different implementation methods could help to ease these problems, eg. automatically replicating com.au registrations in .au.
• The relaxation of policy rules in the past – eg. aligning the eligibility criteria for asn.au and org.au – has forced many registrants to register multiple domain names in order to protect their online identity and brand. This is costly for registrants, especially not-for-profits and small businesses, and leads to a dilution of value of existing domain names.
• The domain name licence period is within scope, ie. the Panel may consider changing the current 2 year licence period.
• The technical implications of any changes need to be considered, to avoid problems such as those caused by registrants implementing wildcard resource records on TLD domain names (eg. com.com.au) when they were released after a change of auDA policy.
• The closed 2LDs (csiro.au, edu.au, gov.au) are excluded from the Terms of Reference, however the impact of opening up .au to direct registrations on the closed 2LDs needs to be taken into account. The closed 2LD managers will have an opportunity to comment through the public consultations.
Next meeting:
Tuesday 10 April, 2-5pm in Sydney
Last Updated: 06/08/2007 15:51
