The Story of New Zealand's Internet

Transcription

Debbie Monahan - Domain Name Commissioner, Domain Name Commission

“In 2010, .NZ took a small but very important step in allowing a greater set of characters to be able to be registered, namely the macrons over vowels. So macronised vowels are used in Te Reo Māori so implementing those into .NZ means that you can truly represent appropriately Māori macrons and represent Te Reo Māori and domain names and use it just like any other language. Significant because up until that stage, Māori either had to double vowel to try and indicate that it was elongated in the language or merely just put up with the single character vowel which didn’t really represent how it was pronounced. So a significant step and we launched it to coincide with Māori Language Week last year...

The number of Māori names in the .nz space is still relatively low. We have a couple of hundred, but a lot of that is about awareness because the other thing we do have is .maori.nz of course. .maori.nz has a macron under Māori and you can use that name either with or without the macron. It’s a case of getting awareness out that we do enable if you like, Māori to be represented within any .NZ domain name. And you can register .NZ names with IDN characters through any authorised registrar.

2010 also saw us authorise our 75th .NZ registrar so there are a large number of registrars for you to choose from if you want to register a .NZ domain name.”