I was looking back through some of the submissions in NZ that were published on the .NZ Domain Names Commission website. They had exactly the same arguments as we are having
. The one below is a great example:
AdNet.co.nz Ltd
Received 19 December 2016
.
co.nz owners should have first right to the .nz equivalent.
.
co.nz is the .com of the nz domain space and the data clearly shows this in the number of registrations vs any other suffix with 480,000 registrations. The next most popular are .
net.nz and .
org.nz which have around 25,000 registrations. Most of these are conflicts with .
co.nz registrations because they were likely registered as an alternative to the .
co.nz which was already taken.
.
co.nz domains have nearly 20x the number of registrations, but are worth 100x the next value domain suffix .
net.nz. Any advertised domain is 99%+ of the time, a .
co.nz.
There would be very few cases where any other domain suffix of a particular name was registered before the .
co.nz version. If this has occurred, it is usually due to an ownership transfer where the registration date may have been reset.
Other suffixes such as .
geek.nz were not even launched until at least a decade after .
co.nz, and were really a way for the DNC to generate more revenue that wasn't successful, not to advance the value of the nz domain space. With a total of only 1,000 .geek registrations (1 in 480 .
co.nz), the fact that these were even put on par in line with .
co.nz owners for .nz, is incredibly inappropriate especially given how strange it was for the DNC to launch these as an actual viable suffix in the first place.