The Domain Name Commission says there is no clear consensus among the large number of submissions it received over the proposal to extend the .nz domain space.
The Domain Name Commission (DNC) received 115 submissions during the public consultation period, which closed on 27 September. The DNC has said the submissions represented a wide range of opinion, and there was no clear consensus either for or against the proposal. The submissions are all available on the DNC website.
While there were a number of submissions in favour of the proposed change, the majority of these were very brief responses to the questions in the online submission form. Interestingly, almost all of the more detailed responses that discussed the issues in more depth were against the proposal. No one has had an opportunity to respond to those detailed criticisms of the proposal yet.
DNC has said that it will undertake further research into the impact of its proposal over the next few months, and says some contributors will likely to be asked to expand on some of the points raised in their submissions.
Extending the .nz domain space would allow registrations at the second-level, for example yourname.nz instead of yourname.co.nz, and this has a variety of implications for trade mark owners and owners of existing domain names.
As well as this additional information gathering, DNC says it plans a second round of consultation in early 2013 before any decision is made. This suggests that it has not been swayed by the criticism of the proposals to date.