I have a few thoughts on this, apologies if this seems a bit conflicted, just what I'm thinking at the moment.

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 3:39 PM, Simon Green <simon@simongreen.net> wrote:

To me this whole things seems like a way for Internet NZ to double
their income. Most entities that have a non conflicting .co.nz domain
will also want to register their .nz domain (even if they don't use
it), just to prevent domain hijacking at a future date. And that means
two payment of domain fees. (ala ICANN allowing arbitrary top level
domains)

How about the other way around, new registrants for .nz being compelled to register .co.nz as well? An interesting thought experiment, but I think people are overall lazy, and this just won't happen unless there is someone encouraging them to do so (their registrar or web developer, most likely). Frankly though, if your business will collapse under the pressure of another $24/yr domain you're probably doing it wrong anyway.

I can't see any benefit to domain owners or the general public in
opening up to 2LD registration. I will be replying to the proposal at
some stage.

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Probably not much benefit to existing domain owners, as someone discussed earlier, most people have invested all their branding in one particular version of their domain, and that's fine. I think it does provide an "in" for new players, whose name of choice might be taken already in the 3ld space but not yet camped out in .nz

I haven't really seen much confusion in the past except where people try to guess the domain of a particular company, and get it wrong, this does probably leave things open for a little confusion. As also mentioned earlier, this isn't really so much an issue any more, as if people want to find you, they just type your company name into the search box. If you're not the first hit, then you've probably done your SEO wrong - or your name is just not very unique :)

Lets take a look at the distribution of .nz 2ld registrations for last month. Apologies if this doesn't display well, but the numbers are all there.

2LD�� Apr-12
.co �� 417188
.net �� 27229
.org �� 26552
.school �� 3285
.ac �� 1929
.gen �� 1381
.geek �� 1148
.govt �� 1117
.maori �� 691
.health �� 147
.iwi �� 79
.mil �� 34
.cri �� 14
.parliament �� 9

Total�� 480803

So out of 480803 total registrations in .nz, we have 417188, or 86.7% of all total registrations being .co.nz, with the next two being 5.6% and 5.5%. Seems like some extra commercial type 2ld categories might be a good idea (tourism.nz, retail.nz, trade.nz?)

Lumping the bulk of domains into .co.nz has already destroyed any semblance of hierarchy, so I don't really see much reason to argue about the sanctity of the old way of doing things. It's already well and truly gone.

I do think that it's worth having a discussion about whether .nz should be opened up fully, or try to find some more 2lds which might be practical - I don't think there should necessarily have to be someone apply for these, historically the process has just taken too long and only industry people really are aware of it (a-la geek.nz, a paltry 1100 registrations after several years in operation) - InternetNZ could come up with some new ones all on their own - and they're the ones with the data on existing registrations already so may be able to further split out the .co.nz registration data into rough categories.

It's probably worth having a good think about further domains to lock out at the 2ld, eg wpad.nz, and isatap.nz (which have been dealt with already in the 3ld space), I'm sure there are others. All of the supported IDN variants of the locked out domains should also be prevented from being registered.

Cheers,
Blair