Activity report Q4 2024–25

InternetNZ provides .nz as a public good.  Aotearoa New Zealand has a high-trust domain name service, and a well-functioning Internet as critical infrastructure. 

A thriving .nz provides funding to invest back into our communities so we support an Internet that benefits all.

InternetNZ will increasingly be able to measure the impact its operation has on the climate.

.nz Rules

The draft 2025/26 .nz rules work programme was provided to the .nz Advisory Committee and approved. The programme includes two phases of rules changes with the first phase focused on minor or technical changes only.

The .nz Advisory Committee also provided feedback on a paper outlining the proposed scope and approach for a 5 year strategy on Disrupting Malicious Abuse (DNS Abuse). Project planning has commenced.

The .nz conflicted names process change is now in the implementation phase, with completion on track for 1 July 2025.  We shared the learnings from our review with auDA. 

A focus on business growth through new services and stimulated growth will support InternetNZ’s
strategy and goals.

Understanding the drivers of our business model and public impact funding enables InternetNZ’s
business model to be resilient and better able to
respond to future changes. 

In this quarter, InternetNZ's new educational project JumpStarter had its first full quarter of public use. This resulted in over 26,000 page views from January until the end of March. The purpose of JumpStarter is to provide free advice on key aspects of launching a new business, this includes highlighting the importance of registering a domain name early. JumpStarter's built in domain availability tool was used to perform 5,000 domain name searches.

There continue to be new opportunities to expand InternetNZ's wholesale domain name offering. This includes adding additional registries to who wholesale domain name services are provided to. To enable this new application of internal skills, a draft product support strategy has been developed this quarter. The strategy will be finalised in the next quarter and will provide a small variety of predefined service offerings to meet the requirements of registry customers.

*Domains Under Management 

InternetNZ strengthens Te Tiriti o Waitangi within our own internet community and internet governance.

InternetNZ’s journey to being a Te Tiriti o Waitangi centric organisation is visible to our kaimahi, partners and internet communities.

Te Ao Māori perspectives increasingly inform our mahi.

The comprehensive Te Tiriti Plan provides focus and definition of what Te Tiriti centred means for INZ Group in any particular year.

A clear NZ perspective and narrative on internet governance policy supports an open, free, secure and interoperable Internet because it’s critical to Aotearoa's economic growth and social and cultural wellbeing.

InternetNZ advocates for a single, global Internet and its multistakeholder governance. We work to model, defend and improve this model of internet governance.

InternetNZ participates in forums and processes to help  shape an internet that benefits all the people of Aotearoa.

NZ’s voice is informed by our internet communities’ perspectives. We are able to present their perspectives and our insights into national, regional, and international forums and meetings.

InternetNZ engaged in a number of Internet governance forums and meetings during the Quarter to support the multi-stakeholder Internet governance system, maintain relationships with the international Internet community, and help shape the Internet’s development for the benefit of Aotearoa and its people. This included (in person and virtual) attendance at OARC44/NANOG93, APTLD87, APRICOT 2025/ APNIC59, and ICANN82.

In terms of our work to defend and improve multistakeholder Internet governance, we continued to focus on the evolving WSIS+20 process this Quarter, mainly through our work with A Technical Community Coalition for Multistakeholderism (TCCM).  We continue to be an active member of the Secretariat of the TCCM, and we were a key contributor to growing the coalition and undertaking its work during the Quarter. TCCM now has 35 member organisations: registries, top-level domain regional groups, registrars, registries for Internet numbers and registry service providers from around the globe. TCCM members met in person at ICANN82 to set up a WSIS Taskforce of engaged members, who will develop TCCM positions on key WSIS+20 issues. 

In January, TCCM submitted a response to the ITU Council Working Group on WSIS and SDG’s Call for Inputs on the WSIS +20 Review, and in March TCCM made a submission on WSIS +20 High-Level Event 2025 Open Consultation Process. In February, InternetNZ signed up to a cross community (civil society, private sector, technical community) statement on WSIS, the IGF and the GDC which was developed at the Internet Governance Forum in December 2024; and in March we input to and signed on to a Five-Point Plan for an Inclusive WSIS+20 Review, which are recommendations from the global multistakeholder community to help the cofacilitators and Secretariat for WSIS+20 operationalize the WSIS+20 modalities to ensure the process is as multistakeholder as possible. 

InternetNZ staff facilitated and presented sessions at the meeting of the Asia Pacific country domain name registries (APTLD) held in Hong Kong in February. The meeting focused on security and resilience. 

InternetNZ met with relevant NZ government agencies (MBIE, MFAT and DPMC) throughout the Quarter on their resourcing and support of Internet governance particularly in multilateral government processes, and to report on issues and meetings in the Internet governance space.

Modernise the InternetNZ Constitution to reflect the legal requirements and being a Te Tiriti centric organisation

InternetNZ and our environment has changed since 2019. We need a refreshed brand that represents us as a Te Tiriti-centric organisation.

Q4 was a pivotal quarter — following the release of the drafting instructions in Q3 we released the Proposed Constitution which in large part reflects the Drafting Guidelines. We refined a number of areas to address feedback from member submissions and input from the wider public. This included a number of  options for further member discussion around areas where there were differing views expressed. Following a short consultation period we called a Special General Meeting (SGM) for March 31st 2025, with pre-voting available for those who could not attend on the night.

The SGM was held online via Zoom, on 31 March, 5:30–8:00 pm, with around 90 members attending on Zoom and around 200 on the livestream.  A strong majority of InternetNZ members — more than four out of five voters — voted to adopt the Proposed Constitution.

Annual Report and SSPs

The SSPs and Annual Reports for InternetNZ and Domain Name Commission are now  in development.

Strategy 2026-31

There have been multiple discussions and workshops about organisational values in InternetNZ Group since 2022. The current state is confusing and contradictory. Overall the strategy, values and organisational purpose mahi was delayed by membership priorities in this Quarter. Since the end of March Te Kahui Tumu has focussed on environmental scan, key interviews, and synthesising a values and purpose draft from all prior work toward a workshop for InternetNZ Group Board Members in May.

Registrars understand their obligations and implement best practices.

Registrars are responsive to domain name holder requests.

Domain name holders are aware they can contact the Domain Name Commission with complaints and enquiries.

As a membership organisation InternetNZ continues to provide a number of avenues for membership to engage on accountability, strategy, public policy and key projects.

InternetNZ builds strong reciprocal partnerships and relationships that support engagement with Māori communities and the Internet community.  

We ensure we have sustainable funding models into the future.

Our Internet governance role is supported through community partnerships and grants, relationships and collaborations. 

We demonstrate InternetNZ’s public good role through the sharing of insights, research, and case studies of impact.

Membership activities (as of 30/04/2025)

This quarter saw an unprecedented increase in members, growing from 372 on 5 February to 4,791 by 30 April, a 1,188% rise. We processed 4,434 new memberships, significantly increasing administrative demands. Following feedback from some applicants who were unclear about their sign-up (particularly between 26 March and 3 April), we implemented a manual consent review process for 1,319 affected members. This additional due diligence ensured legal compliance, with 992 confirming consent, 35 withdrawing, and 292 unresponsive (who will receive refunds). We have since automated explicit consent in the sign-up process to streamline future operations.

The membership renewal process is currently underway, with 105 members currently in the grace period and requiring membership renewal. 

We stood up a Code of Conduct for key channels, and breach of Code of Conduct processes and external moderation support.  

The annual membership survey is in development for release in May. Options to reintroduce member-to-member emails were explored and we have a pathway forward.  However, given the substantial changes in membership numbers, we will include questions on opening up this channel in the upcoming survey. 

Over this period we also managed ongoing media queries and media management with 61 mentions of InternetNZ throughout the quarter (11 Dec–8 April) as follows:

1. 52% — Members and Constitution

2. 37% — Internet Insights report

3. 11% — Other

Planning for the annual elections and AGM have commenced and there is a paper on the May Board agenda for approval.

Funding

Funding disbursements for this financial year have all been allocated. The percentage of funding provided to Māori entities or individuals has also increased this year to 44.86% of total funding. We continued to support accessibility with another round of web accessibility grants this year and a grant to Blind Low Vision NZ that supports people to use natural language rather than commands in Alexa Skills. InternetNZ also supported the inaugural New Zealand IAASysters programme held during NZNOG in Napier — the IAASysters programme aims to get more women and non-binary representation in the internet workforce with a networking/ workshop event held on Day 0 of the NZNOG conference. 

We continued our support of the participatory grants round with Tāiki e! and the Tairāwhiti community and participated in their community funding panel - a diverse range of community projects have received grants such as digital literacy hubs, HF Email radio servers for the region, digital storytelling, a rangatahi-led design tank, and workshops for kaumatua to use Alexa. 

An end of year report and learnings from Taiki e! partnership are included in our end-of-year grants and funding update to the Board on the May agenda.  

Sustainable INZ Community Fund 

We provided a paper to the Audit & Risk Committee on the key elements for consideration in an INZ Community Fund, and provided 3 scenarios for illustration on how it might work across a 10-year period.  The Committee has made recommendations to the Board and a paper is on the May agenda. 

The Committee also considered the approach and size of the community funding envelope for 2025/26 and has made recommendations for the Board to consider.   

Internet Insights survey

The Internet Insights survey was publicly released on 20 March. The communications team produced six media releases and an op-ed, which were all picked up by various media outlets. In total, 22 articles were published nationwide, including from high profile mainstream media, such as NZ Herald, Stuff, 1News and RNZ. The CE appeared on Morning Report, interviewed by Ingrid Hipkiss. And featured on a range of radio shows - from Radio Waatea News to Newstalk ZB and MoreFM. The Insights were also mentioned on the TVNZ Breakfast show. The response to the research was both widespread and overwhelmingly positive.  

Public Policy agenda for 2025

Work on false information online commenced in Q4 and completion was delayed by a focus on membership surge activities.  

Our work on digital equity with DECA has commenced and we have developed draft measures of economic exclusion ready for conversations with key stakeholders and gathering of research and data.   

No Tech Day

Also as part of our partnership with DECA we are part of a working group that will deploy ‘No Tech Day’ later this year. While the day is still in development, its focus will be to highlight opportunity costs from digital inequities, and to fundraise through corporate or group activities.  The day will be officially launched as part of the Connecting Aotearoa Summit in May run by TUANZ, with deployment proposed to be around August.

Broadband Map

We continued the Broadband Map product strategy implementation. The team has worked on new data releases and started preparation work for the fixed release schedule roll out.