Published in Inside Tourism, Issue 919, 7 March 2013
The opportunity to use "kiwi" as their second level domain name is the first concrete example of how the domain name system is changing for New Zealand businesses.
Domain names are the way the Internet is organised, navigated and understood. Your domain name is one of the most effective and affordable ways to promote your brand and maximize online visibility.
The Consumer Law Reform Bill will bring a number of changes and we reported briefly on most of them in July 2012. One of these changes attracting attention is a proposed change to the Fair Trading Act which will prohibit "unsubstantiated representations".
A representation is "unsubstantiated", if the person making it does not, when it is made, have reasonable grounds for the representation, irrespective of whether it is false or misleading. This means a business can make a claim which is correct but still breach the Fair Trading Act, if it can not point to evidence substantiating the claim at the time it made it.
A new food standard (Standard 1.2.7 - Nutrition, Health and Related Claims) (Standard) developed by Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) which affects how food businesses can label or advertise foods became law on 18 January 2013.
The Standard seeks to reduce the risk of misleading and deceptive claims about food by regulating the voluntary statements that can be made about:
MEGA, Kim Dotcom's new online file storage site has, a .co.nz domain name. In the week after its launch mega.co.nz was New Zealand's biggest website in terms of traffic and peaked in the top 150 websites visited worldwide.
MEGA provides a huge profile boost for the .co.nz domain name which is administered by InternetNZ on behalf of the global internet body ICANN.
Published in Inside Tourism, Issue 910, 6 December 2012
Advertisers beware. The Federal Court of Australia's ruling in the recent case of ACCC v Google has exposed practices to avoid when marketing your business on the web. The Court viewed the conduct in the case as so outrageous that it was prepared to find Google responsible for their part in displaying the advertisements. The case sends a crystal clear message to advertisers: do not be tempted to monopolise your market by stealing your competitor's name - more simply, do not abuse AdWords. The decision is relevant to advertisers in New Zealand because our fair trading laws are virtually identical to those in Australia.
At present the domain name system for Internet addresses is defined by 22 top-level domains (these include .com, .net and .org) and approximately 250 country code top level domains (such as .nz and .uk). This is about to change dramatically.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the non profit organisation responsible for coordinating top-level domains, is introducing new top level domains in a programme that is expected to bring exponential growth to the number of top-level domains. In June ICANN unveiled the 1,930 applications for new top-level domains received in the first application round. ICANN is to prioritise these for evaluation and the first new top-level domains could become operational as soon as April 2013.
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