Domain Name Commission Limited Board Minutes - June 2013
Minutes - Board Meeting 27 June 2013
Present
Joy Liddicoat (Chair), Michael Foley, David Farrar, Kenneth Johnston, Andy Linton, Debbie Monahan, Alison McKenzie, Hamish MacEwan (observer).
1. Register of Interests
The DNCL Register of Interests was updated. No conflicts were noted for this meeting.
2. Minutes of the last meeting
The minutes of the last DNCL Board meeting were passed as true and accurate. There were no matters arising that were not covered elsewhere in the agenda.
3. DNCL Work plan
The DNC spoke to the current plan which will be revised when a decision is made on whether the proposal to allow registrations at the second level is made.
4. .nz Update
The Chair and DNC updated the Board on discussions with NZRS re principles and operation of the new .nz marketing site being operated by NZRS. These will be finalised shortly and will also form part of the .nz strategy being developed.
It was agreed that the handling of queries through the site should be monitored and a review undertaken after a period of operation of the site.
5. DNC Reports
April and May DNC reports were taken as read. There was discussion around the monitoring of media advertising with the DNC noting a baseline was being set for the usage of domain names in advertising and that as the information increased, trends and changes will be presented to the Board. The DNC was thanked for her reports.
6. Health and Safety
MBIE and the Institute of Directors have produced a governance guidelines document on Health and Safety that the Board reviewed, along with the current DNCL Health and Safety Policy. It was agreed that the current policies are appropriate but they noted that the guidelines for small organisations is pending and will review that document when it is published.
The Board noted the importance of Health and Safety and their obligations and it was agreed that regular reviews of the policies and risk register should be formalised and should also be included in the induction of new directors.
7. .nz Strategy
The draft strategy resulting from the session held in April was discussed and agreed with some changes. Outcomes and measures of success will be added to the document and presented at the next Board meeting.
8. DNSSEC
Barry Brailey spoke to his paper. It provides a good understanding of DNSSEC in other jurisdictions and highlights the issues that other TLDs are having in getting chains of trust to be used. It was agreed that DNCL should take a role in promoting the uptake of DNSSEC, by all entities involved in DNS not only registrars. A coordinated and proactive approach, as outlined by Barry in his paper, was the preferred option of the Board and Barry will now develop a more detailed plan based on that and present that to the Board.
9. Registrations at the Second Level Proposal
This item was discussed in committee. It was noted by the Board that it was important that people see DNCL have considered all the issues raised during the consultations.
10. Chair Update
There were no items to discuss that had not already been addressed elsewhere on the agenda.
11. Any other business
The DNC raised a matter where a technical issue at the registry had allowed 17 names to be registered contrary to the policy. These are IDN names where the system erroneously let the IDN punycode through in both fields, rather than one field being the IDN Unicode. This resulted in domain names being able to be registered that did not meet the defined character set. NZRS have advised that the issue has been fixed so these names are no longer able to be registered but there was an issue with how to handle the names already registered. The Board agreed with the DNC' s position that we should not permit names in the register that are against our policies and so the names should be cancelled. They also agreed that the issue resulted from an error at the registry and that the names should never have been able to be registered so it was fair to offer the registrar a refund for the names involved. It was agreed that the wording of 4.2 of the RMC policy will be reviewed to make sure it is clear what characters are permitted. The DNC will include more detail on this issue in her June report.
Next meeting – 15 August 2013