NOTE: This may be getting off topic for nznog - happy to leave nznog off any future replies if requested and keep this debate on INZ lists only. Bart wrote:

At 20:11 26/08/02 GMT, David Farrar wrote:

...

Yep that would be the way to do it. I suspect in reality though this would effectively kill co.nz etc as the vast majority of registrants would want to go from say telecom.co.nz to telecom.nz.

Considering how small New Zealand is, it would have made sense to stick to ..nz; In the Netherlands they work happely with .nl and that country has a population 15 million.

If you would open it up now a lot of new income would be generated ofcourse, as all major domain holders would have to use it, but also could not afford to close down the .co.nz version either :) Let the money flow! Actually, I would like to see it; First one in use would be bart.nz

Opening up the 2LD would indeed be very profitable for INZ and Registrars as registrations would probably come close to doubling (hopefully INZ would lower the registry fee if this was the case). A lot of that money could be tied up in lawsuits if for example the owner of coke.co.nz missed out by a millisecond (assume first in first served with a known start date/time) at registering coke.nz they would get very upset with someone. You can mitigate this by allowing preferential rights to holders of name.co.nz, name.org.nz to register name.nz but I believe there are seveal thousand clashes where different registrants have different 2LD variations of a 3LD name. Example is national.org.nz is National Party and national.co.nz is the BNZ so no easy way to decide who gets first dibs to national.nz. None of these issues are unsolvable but one has to tread damn carefully to avoid death by 100 lawsuits. DPF - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog