effective strategy with over 50% of domain holders still being billed directly, resulting in significant collection costs being incurred. Peter Mott of 2Day Internet says that this new pricing differential is unlikely to affect the choice of domain names for for most New Zealand businesses. "New Zealand customers prefer a .nz name" says Mott. According to Mott, one of the biggest problems with the .com domain is that it is now very congested and there's only a slim chance that most people's first choice of a name is still available. Mott adds "NSI [the US registration authority] does have a dispute policy which in some situations can disadvantage name holders, but we have not experienced any problems with domains held by NZ customers." O'Brien says "In our experience, service rather than price tends to be the real issue. There's a real misconception out there that New Zealand is an awfully expensive place for domain names." O'Brien went on record last year to say that the Domainz charges would be reviewed mid '98 but, like Mott, he believes that the changes to US pricing wont have any major bearing on user's decisions. Domainz plans to place more emphasis on creating an attractive discount structure for agents when it reviews its pricing as promised, later in the year. If you're thinking we're worse off here in New Zealand, have some sympathy for Australian companies looking to register a domain name under .com.au. This page explains the rather restrictive rules regarding the issuance