.nz is the Internet

country code top-level domain A country code top-level domain (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. All ASCII ccTLD identifiers are two letters long, and all tw ...

(ccTLD) for

New Zealand New Zealand () is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and List of islands of New Zealand, over 600 smaller islands. It is the List of isla ...

. It is administered by InternetNZ, with oversight and dispute resolution handled by its subsidiary company, the Domain Name Commission Limited (DNCL). Registrations are processed via authorised registrars. there were 747,256 registered .nz domains.

History

As with many long-standing domain registries, the registry was maintained informally for some time. The first formally recognised administrative organisation was the

University of Waikato The University of Waikato (), established in 1964, is a Public university, public research university located in Hamilton, New Zealand, Hamilton, New Zealand. An additional campus is located in Tauranga. The university performs research in nume ...

until the responsibility was delegated to InternetNZ when it was formed in 1995. Prior to the current structure, the registry operator of .nz was Domainz. Historically, Domainz was a subsidiary of InternetNZ which also operated as a registrar and vendor of other add-on services such as DNS. This combination of a

natural monopoly A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming adv ...

(the registry activities) and

vertical integration In microeconomics, management and international political economy, vertical integration, also referred to as vertical consolidation, is an arrangement in which the supply chain of a company is integrated and owned by that company. Usually each ...

(the registrar and other services) was seen by some as restricting competition so InternetNZ moved to separate the provision of registry services into a separate organisation with strong oversight. The final part of this transition process was the sale of Domainz to

Melbourne IT Webcentral, is an Australian digital services provider. It is a publicly-traded company that was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in December 1999. It provides internet domain registration, email/office applications, cloud hosting ...

in August 2003. From 1 April 2008 the "Office of the Domain Name Commissioner" (several employees of InternetNZ, including the Domain Name Commissioner herself) became the "Domain Name Commission Limited", a subsidiary company of InternetNZ.

Registry software and protocol

The Shared Registry System (SRS) was initially developed in 2002, and provided .nz registry services until November 2022. In January 2004 the source code to the SRS system was released to the public under a GPL license. Since 2010 the SRS also supported the standard Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP). In September 2019 InternetNZ announced their intent to replace the SRS and that the new system would not include the SRS protocol. The transition to a closed-source commercial registry product provided by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority was completed on the 1st of November, 2022. This transition replaced both the public facing WHOIS service and the APIs used by registrars to interact with the registry.

Māori domain names

On 22 July 2010, the Domain Name Commission announced that .nz domain names with macron vowels (ā, ē, ī, ō and ū) would be available from the following week to allow

Māori language Māori (; endonym: 'the Māori language', commonly shortened to ) is an Eastern Polynesian languages, Eastern Polynesian language and the language of the Māori people, the indigenous population of mainland New Zealand. The southernmost membe ...

words to be correctly represented in domain names.

Second-level domain changes

* .geek.nz - This second level domain was approved by the council of InternetNZ on 5 July 2003. * .kiwi.nz - This second level domain was approved on 24 August 2012 and made available for registrations on 11 September 2012.

Second-level domains

There are a number of second-level domains that identify whether the user is a company, a non-commercial organisation, government body or other classification. In October 2013, InternetNZ decided to allow domain names to be registered at the second level in the .nz domain name space, aligning the .nz domain name space with a majority of other top level domains that already allow registrations directly at the second level. The second level domain names were launched with a sunrise period from 30 September 2014 to 30 March 2015 (to allow people with similar domains to register the shorter version). From 30 March 2015 .nz domain names were available to everyone. The early New Zealand second-level domains ac.nz, .co.nz and .govt.nz were based on those used in the UK. At the time it was considered desirable that the names were not in use as first-level domains, so .edu.nz, .com.nz and .gov.nz were rejected. There are also sub-level domains unique to New Zealand, such as iwi.nz for Māori

iwi Iwi () are the largest social units in New Zealand Māori society. In Māori, roughly means or , and is often translated as "tribe". The word is both singular and plural in the Māori language, and is typically pluralised as such in English. ...

and the broader maori.nz for other Māori organisations, and geek.nz for "

geek The word ''geek'' is a slang term originally used to describe Eccentricity (behavior), eccentric or non-mainstream people; in current use, the word typically connotes an expert or enthusiast obsessed with a hobby or intellectual pursuit. In th ...

s". The following second-level domains are in use with their official descriptions. Since only some of the domains are moderated, it is possible to register outside the area intended.

Unmoderated

* .nz – First level NZ domain, general use * .ac.nz – Tertiary educational institutions and related organisations * .co.nz – Organisations pursuing commercial aims and purposes * .geek.nz – For people who are concentrative, technically skilled, and imaginative who are generally adept with computers * .gen.nz – Individuals and other organisations not covered elsewhere * .kiwi.nz – For people or organisations that associate with being ' Kiwi' (the colloquial term for New Zealanders) * .maori.nz – Māori people, groups, and organisations * .net.nz – Organisations and service providers directly related to the NZ Internet * .org.nz – Not-for-profit organisations * .school.nz – Primary, secondary and pre-schools and related organisations

Moderated

* .cri.nz – Crown Research Institutes * .govt.nz – National, regional and local government organisations operating with statutory powers. The government registrar
DNS.govt.nz
controls registration; a government portal operates a
www.govt.nz
* .health.nz – Health organisations * .iwi.nz – Traditional Māori

(tribes),

hapū In Māori language, Māori and New Zealand English, a ' ("subtribe", or "clan") functions as "the basic political unit within Māori society". A Māori person can belong to or have links to many hapū. Historically, each hapū had its own chief ...

, or groups * .mil.nz – The military organisation of the New Zealand government, the

New Zealand Defence Force The New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF; , "Line of Defence of New Zealand") is the three-branched military of New Zealand. The NZDF is responsible for the protection of the national security of New Zealand and its realm, promoting its interests, ...

* .parliament.nz – Reserved for parliamentary agencies, offices of parliament, and parliamentary political parties and their elected members; main website operates a
www.parliament.nz

Previously used

* archie.nz – used for an

Archie search engine Archie is a tool for indexing FTP archives, allowing users to more easily identify specific files. It is considered the first Internet search engine. The original implementation was written in 1990 by Alan Emtage, then a postgraduate student at ...

server operated by the

until the mid-1990s.

References

External links

IANA .nz whois information.nz registry

.nz Domain Name Commission

List of .nz authorised registrars
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nz Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries members Country code top-level domains Internet in New Zealand Mass media in New Zealand Internet properties established in 1987 sv:Toppdomän#N