As with many long-standing domain registries the registry was maintained informally for some time. The first formally recognised administrative organisation was the University of Waikato until the responsibility was delegated to InternetNZ when it was formed in 1995. Prior to the current structure, the registry operator of.nz was Domainz. Historically, Domainz was a subsidiary of InternetNZ which also operated as a registrar and vendor of other add-on services such as DNS. This combination of a natural monopoly and vertical integration was seen by some as restricting competition so InternetNZ moved to separate the provision of registry services into a separate organisation with strong oversight. The final part of this transition process was the sale of Domainz to Melbourne IT in August 2003. From 1 April 2008 the "Office of the Domain Name Commissioner" became the "Domain Name Commission Limited", a subsidiary company of InternetNZ.
.kiwi.nz - This Second Level Domain was approved on 24 August 2012 and made available for registrations on 11 September 2012 at 10am.
Second-level domains
There are a number of second-level domains that identify whether the user is a company, a non-commercial organisation, government body or other classification. In October 2013, InternetNZ decided to allow domain names to be registered at the second level in the.nz domain name space, aligning the.nz domain name space with a majority of other top level domains that already allow registrations directly at the second level. The second level domain names were launched with a sunrise period from 30 September 2014 to 30 March 2015. From 30 March 2015.nz domain names were available to everyone. The early New Zealand second-level domains 'ac.nz', '.co.nz' and '.govt.nz' were based on those used in the UK. At the time it was considered desirable that the names were not in use as first-level domains, so '.edu.nz', '.com.nz' and '.gov.nz' were rejected. There are also sub-level domains unique to New Zealand, such as 'iwi.nz' for Māoriiwi and the broader 'maori.nz' for other Māori organisations, and 'geek.nz' for 'geeks'. The following second-level domains are in use with their official descriptions. Since only some of the domains are moderated, it is possible to register outside the area intended.
.govt.nz – National, regional and local government organisations operating with statutory powers. The government registrar, controls registration; a government portal operates at
.health.nz – Health organisations
.iwi.nz – Traditional Māori tribes, hapū, or Taura here groups. Available from
The shared registry system, initially developed in 2002, is both the name of the core.nz registry system and the name of one of two main protocols, SRS protocol, used to communicate with the registry system. Since 2010, the SRS has also supported the extensible provisioning protocol, which is now a common standard used by registries. The SRS has been released as open source software, the last published version was made in 2010 and can be found on SourceForge. In September 2019, InternetNZ announced their intention to replace the SRS and that the new system will not include the SRS protocol.
Māori domain names
On 22 July 2010, the Domain Name Commission announced that.nz domain names with macron vowels would be available from the following week to allow Māori language words to be correctly represented in domain names.
