Compliance and enforcement (2021-2022)

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Part of our work in the compliance space includes contributing to InternetNZ’s .nz policy-making work and ensuring our regulated parties know and understand their obligations. We also intervene when rules are broken.

Case study:

When a provider becomes unavailable (deceased or absent)

 

Sometimes domain name providers name themselves as the registrant, rather than their customer, which is a breach of .nz policy.

Last year we were advised that a provider of domain names had sadly passed away. The provider had a large number of domains registered in their company name instead of their customers’ names, and many of those domain names’ billing dates were coming up.

 

DNCL undertook a compliance project which resulted in most of those customers’ domain name’s being claimed by the user of the domain name. As many of the domain names were integral to the operation of small businesses, this was a particularly rewarding project.

There were 288 domain name suspensions in 2021/2022 compared to 813 and 445 in the previous two financial years.

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There are four organisations that regularly report fake registrant details for the Commission to validate.

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The number of domain name suspension requests that didn’t result in a suspension was 137.  Reasons for domains not resulting in suspension included the registrant being contactable, the registrant validated their identity, or the registrar had already suspended the domain name.

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Of the 288 suspensions, 10 were reversed following successful validation (75 were reversed the year before). A suspension is reversed if the registrant can confirm their identity and contact details.

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The Commission uses another layer of identity validation through our independent service provider validate.com. Of the 32 domains put through validate.com, 24  successfully passed our additional due diligence.

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1,007 URLs, as distinct from domain names (the majority of which related to a single .nz domain name), were reported to us by our partner, Internet Watch Foundation for CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse material).  These reports were forwarded to our MoU partner DIA as candidates for investigation and any necessary regulatory and criminal action. This is a significant reduction from 2,503 the year before, indicating that .nz is moving to be a safer place.

Clean DNS - NZDNC Abuse Reports graph

CAPTION Clean DNS - NZDNC Abuse Reports

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