Indigenous Domain Names

.iwi.nz, .maori.nz and .māori.nz are three of the world’s first five Indigenous domain names; the other two are .nsn.us and .nsn.gov, for Native Sovereign Nations in America.

A domain name is the human-readable address of a website or email service on the Internet, such as taiuru.maori.nz. Domain names work from right to left: the top-level domain comes last (.nz, the country code for New Zealand); the second-level domain before it (such as .co.nz, .iwi.nz or .maori.nz) describes the community the registrant belongs to; and the registrant chooses the name in front of that. Behind the scenes, the Domain Name System (DNS) translates each name into the numeric address of a computer. Domain names are, in effect, the street addresses of the Internet, so how a people can name themselves in them is a question of identity online.

It has been 20 years since .iwi.nz was created for iwi, and 12 years since the online Māori community, through the New Zealand Māori Internet Society, petitioned InternetNZ for its own descriptive second-level domain, .maori.nz. In July 2010 it became possible to use macrons in .nz domain names, and after an initial request by the New Zealand Māori Internet Society and a public consultation process, the DNC mirrored .māori.nz to all .maori.nz domains.

Since Indigenous domain names were introduced in .nz, no research has been done, and no engagement has taken place, with the .maori.nz registrants, the .iwi.nz registrants or the wider online Māori community to establish how effective the domain names are, whether they have helped authors publish Māori content on the web, or whether they have influenced the web in New Zealand.

Consultation within .iwi.nz has been haphazard and reactive, with minimal input from the community. This is likely because consultation has not been carried out in a culturally appropriate manner. Alternatively, it could be argued that a Māori organisation that is online should be comfortable engaging in consultation that is not face to face. The fact remains that there has been little to no consultation with, or feedback from, the community of Indigenous domain name registrants.

There is a need to study and engage with stakeholders to gain a clear picture of how Indigenous domain names are used, what preferences people have, and what social and cultural impacts, if any, these domains have on the community.

There is also a need to identify why Māori content providers prefer or choose non-Indigenous domain names, gTLDs and other ccTLDs, and to understand the growing trend of using social media links as primary website addresses and free webmail addresses as primary email addresses.

There is a further need to record the history of Indigenous domains in .nz, as no records currently exist. This issue is not unique to New Zealand; the lack of documentation of Internet governance decisions is a common theme across the Asia Pacific.

As recently as November 2012, InternetNZ called for historical information about its own constitutional objectives, specifically in the context of being a recognised ccTLD manager. Muhamad-Brandner (2010) notes the obvious lack of information about Indigenous domains on the web, including in Connecting the Clouds (Newman, 2008), the history of the Internet in New Zealand published by New Zealand’s own Internet governing body.

The lack of recorded facts is also leading to the Indigenous domains being misrepresented in academic research and in 2026 by Māori tech perpetuating an erasure of Māori knowledge of the Internet Name System in New Zealand.

The same lack of historical information exists for the world’s other Indigenous domains, .nsn.us and .nsn.gov, where contradictory yet official information exists about when and why they were introduced (Muhamad-Brandner, 2010).

Te reo Māori

No research has been done into how New Zealand’s second official language is used in domain names by individuals, companies, or government and educational bodies that have an obligation to use Māori names in the offline world.

It is important that te reo Māori in Internet domain names is researched and analysed, because domain names are the online equivalent of geographical place names, street names and personal names.

The New Zealand Government has honoured its Treaty of Waitangi obligations by creating bilingual names for over 200 of its entities, a number of which have te reo Māori strategies and firm Treaty of Waitangi strategies. Yet in the online world, which the majority of New Zealanders connect to and use as part of everyday life (Statistics New Zealand, Internet Service Provider Survey, 2012), the commitments and considerations are different.

The use of te reo Māori in web page content has been researched in academia (Keegan, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004). Te reo Māori in domain names, however, has never been researched or analysed, nor even mentioned in academic work. It is the last frontier of te reo Māori to be explored, and it has a major impact on all Māori Internet users and on the use of te reo Māori.

Nor has there ever been an analysis of the New Zealand Government’s strict moderation policies for its Internet addresses .govt.nz, .mil.nz, .health.nz, .cri.nz and .parliament.nz, none of which offer bilingual options to match the bilingual naming conventions of the physical world.

No research exists on how te reo Māori is used for online identity in Internet domain names, on how people perceive their organisation being labelled as Māori online, or on the use of common tribal dialect variations such as k/ng, ng/n, wh/h and wh/w.

Timeline of Indigenous domain names

The following timeline of Indigenous domain name developments sets out factual dates to clear up some misconceptions about who achieved what, and when.

1992 – Six Nations, Blackfoot, Wabanaki, Navajo and other nations refused entry to the DNS as sovereign states
1993–1995 – nsn.us created: the world’s first Indigenous domain name (exact date unknown)
1994 – .iwi.nz created
1997 – First .maori.nz submission
2000 – Karaitiana Taiuru appointed .iwi.nz moderator
2000 – .iwi.nz moderation policy updated
2001 – Second .maori.nz submission
2002 – .nsn.gov created
2002 – Third .maori.nz submission
2002 (7 June) – .maori.nz approved by the InternetNZ Council
2002 (4 September) – .maori.nz implemented: the world’s first unmoderated Indigenous domain name
2002 (December) – nz.soc.maori proposed and created
2003 – .iwi.nz moderation policy updated
2003 – FreeParking made the official domain name registrar for .iwi.nz
2005 – Karaitiana Taiuru asks for macrons to be implemented in .nz domain names
2005 – .cat introduced
2006 – .bzh introduced
2007 (18 August) – .nz bilingual proposal submitted and declined
2008 (December) – Karaitiana Taiuru appointed leader of the .indigi Indigenous domain initiative
2010 (26 July) – Macrons in .nz domain name registrations made possible (Māori Language Week); .māori.nz made a default
2011 – .iwi.nz moderation policy updated
2012 (11 September) – .kiwi.nz launches
2013 – GodZone Internet Services co-appointed official domain name registrar for .iwi.nz, as it could register macrons
2013 (June) – .eus for the Basque language approved by ICANN
2013 – .zulu application withdrawn
2014 (March) – .kiwi introduced, with protected Māori names reserved
2014 (April) – .eus delegated to the root zone
2014 – .gal introduced

Māori Television: a protected name

The name of the Māori Television Service is protected by legislation. Section 11 of the Māori Television Service (Te Aratuku Whakaata Irirangi Māori) Act 2003 reads:

11 Protection of names

(1) No person may be incorporated or registered under any other enactment or in any other manner using the following names:
(a) Māori Television Service:
(b) Te Aratuku Whakaata Irirangi Māori:
(c) any other name that so resembles the names in paragraph (a) or paragraph (b) as to be likely to mislead a person.

(2) No person other than the Service may, either alone or with another person, trade or carry on business—
(a) under a name listed in subsection (1)(a) or (b); or
(b) under a name, knowing that it so resembles a name listed in subsection (1)(a) or (b) as to be likely to mislead a person.

(3) A person who breaches subsection (2) commits an offence and is liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding $2,500.

Section 11(3): amended, on 1 July 2013, by section 413 of the Criminal Procedure Act 2011 (2011 No 81).

See: Māori TV names protected by unusual legislation (Computerworld New Zealand).

The ISO issue: why Indigenous Peoples cannot have their own ccTLD

Every country on the ISO 3166-1 list is given a two-letter country code, such as .nz for New Zealand and .au for Australia, which IANA/ICANN then assigns as a country code top-level domain (ccTLD). The ISO 3166-1 list is a broadly accepted list of country codes intended for many uses, not only for domain names.

A country or sovereign state is automatically assigned a name in the Domain Name System. Where Indigenous Peoples are still the majority and in government, as in Samoa and Tonga, there is no need for them to apply or lobby for the right to be represented on the Internet. Indigenous Peoples living within a colonial state have no such right: they are not on the ISO 3166-1 list, so they cannot have their own ccTLD.

This is why the Six Nations, Blackfoot, Wabanaki, Navajo and other nations were turned away from the Domain Name System in 1992: they lacked ISO 3166 country code status (see History of .nsn.gov and .nsn.us).

It is often argued that Indigenous Peoples can use space within their country’s ccTLD. To date this has happened for only two Indigenous groups, Native Sovereign Nations and Māori. None of the five Indigenous domain names had an independent process for Indigenous Peoples to follow; each depended on the government and the Internet governing body of its country. For Māori it was a time-consuming and expensive process that addresses only part of the identity issue.

The only other route is a generic top-level domain from ICANN, either through the New gTLD Program or as a sponsored domain, as the Catalan (.cat), Breton (.bzh), Basque (.eus) and Galician (.gal) peoples have done. The costs and difficulties of that route for Māori are discussed in the .maori section.

.maori

This section is published online in full as “Feasibility of maori as a new Internet address” on taiuru.co.nz, with its sources and later additions.

Dot Kiwi

This section has not yet been written. Related articles:

Dot Indigi

This section has not yet been written. Related articles:

nz.soc.maori (Usenet)

nz.soc.maori is perhaps the only Indigenous-specific name on Usenet.

USENET: the 2002 proposal for nz.soc.maori, with the group’s charter
Māori activism and hidden achievements in New Zealand’s Internet Domain Name System (2017, PDF; section on nz.soc.maori)
In the Media (includes the 2003 Scoop article “Maori establish presence in Usenet”)

Alternative options for Indigenous domains for Māori

Other options include looking at other countries’ domain names and seeking a cooperative relationship or, where a domain is open to any registrant, simply registering in it.

An initial registration could be used to create subdomains reflecting Māori society, such as iwi and marae, creating a whole new Māori domain name system. Alternatively, these names could be used for a URL shortener service that produces Māori-language-specific domain names.

The obvious domain names that are ready for, and applicable to, the Māori language and Māori society are:

.ae, .ai, .am, .ao, .au, .co, .fm, .ie, .io, .ke, .ki, .ma, .me, .mo, .mu, .na, .ne, .ng, .pa, .re, .ro, .ru, .to, .tv

For the full list of top-level domains, see the List of Internet top-level domains.

History of .nsn.gov and .nsn.us

Native American Indians have their own domain names, .nsn.us and .nsn.gov. Muhamad-Brandner (2010) states that it is not certain how, why, by whom, or even when they were created. The earliest reference to an nsn.us domain is in the Internet Monthly Report of March 1995 (retrieved 14 July 2010).

In 1992, the Six Nations, the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Wabanaki Confederacy and all Jay Treaty Nations under the joint colonial trusts of the United States and Canada, together with the Navajo Nation and others under the sole colonial trust of the United States, attempted to obtain access to the Domain Name System as sovereign states. They were rebuffed by Jon Postel and Michael St. Johns because they lacked ISO 3166 country code status and had not been given international status under the UN Treaty. The .nsn.us domain was then created by the US registrar.

Sources: ICANN comments archive; Domain Handbook.

It can only be assumed that the domains were created by the US registrar between 1993 and 1995; nsn.us does not appear in RFC 1480 (June 1993), and the earliest reference to it is March 1995 (Cooper & Postel, 1993; Cooper, 1995). Cooper, A., & Postel, J. (1993). RFC 1480: The US domain. Retrieved 14 July 2010 from www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1480.txt

NSN is the abbreviation for Native Sovereign Nations. The .nsn.us domain is used to designate Native Sovereign Nations, for example Indian tribes, villages, colonies and other communities that may span state, regional and national boundaries.

Notes

www.real-world-solutions.org/calvin/html/usdom.htm#Special Domains
Sec. 102-173.65, What is the naming convention for Native Sovereign Nations? .GOV Domain Name Registration Policy.
Personal correspondence from R. Himona or maori2000.com.

How to cite this page

Taiuru, K. (2026, November 11). Indigenous Domain Names. Taiuru & Associates Ltd. https://www.taiuru.co.nz/indigenous-domain-names/