Council of Country Code Administrators

Industry:	Registrar
Headquarters:	Drumsite, Christmas Island
Country:	Australia
Website:	cocca.cx
Facebook:	Profile
Twitter:	@COCCA_Council

Council of Country Code Administrators, or CoCCA, is a non-profit organization and a forum engaged in the collaboration of ccTLD managers. Membership to this organization is free. The Council of Country Code Administrators is an active Domain Roundtable participant.

Services

CoCCA is involved in the following activities:

• Deployment support
• Harmonized development of policy
• Training and technical support provisions for ccTLD members
• CoCCA OpenReg development, registry software
• Additional value added and upgrade features as per the demands and needs of the ccTLDs.

CoCCA Open Registry

The CoCCA OpenReg works on multiple platforms that include Solaris, MacOCX, Windows and Linux. This is an open source based registry, with complete Registry-Registrar components. The open registry is also capable of personalized Whois and Automatic PDF invoicing.

Features

The zone generator customizable Whois feature of the CoCCA OpenReg allows the public to access all pertinent information. The open registry also offers the users a domain transfer feature, which allows full domain name transfer controlled by the registrant. Flexible customization applied to policies of registry and renewals are also some of the features of CoCCA OpenReg. It also enables automatic invoicing for bulk renewals as well as multiple annual renewals. The registration restriction feature is a key option, which controls use of offensive names and generic names such as names of places and famous personality names.

Latest Additions

Since March 2011, the CoCCA Registry software was also updated with the extensions – CHIP (ClearingHouse for Intellectual Property) and Trademark (TM) EPP. The software is in use by the managers of more than 30 IDN and ASCII TLDs, with others transitioning to the service. The CHIP technology has been implemented to safeguard the Internet rights of trademark owners effectively and efficiently. The CHIP validation trademark information will be made available through the historical abstracts and Whois registry.

In November, 2011, it was announced that CoCCA had teamed with Sedari and Cloud Registry to apply for the proposed .sydney and .melbourne GeoTLDs. They are submitting a joint application to the governments of New South Wales and Victoria, which announced requests for proposals the previous month. Cloud Registry would run the back-end, while Sedari handled the back-office functions and CoCCA provided knowledge gained through its experience as a ccTLD platform.

CoCCA and APTLD

In October 2012, CoCCA withdrew from APTLD with the claim that the association of regional ccTLD operators backed AusRegistry because AusRegistry is one of its largest donors. APTLD submitted a comment in support of keeping a longstanding registry back-end contract with AusRegistry rather than opening it up to the public. Of that comment, CoCCA director Garth Miller issued an email, saying: "That AusRegistry, a large for-profit company that is an associate member of APTLD can simply make a phone call to a board member and get the board to make a public submission on behalf of all members that a scheduled public tender be cancelled and AusRegistry be awarded the contract – worth as much as several hundred million dollars, because they have made substantial contributions to the APLTD in the past and are likely to do so in the future if awarded the contract is, in my view, disturbing." CoCCa believe the .au contract, which AusRegistry currently holds, should be opened up to competitive bidding. According to Domain Incite, however, Miller's view is the minority view. Under the consultation of AuDA, the policy overseer for Australia’s .au domain, numerous other registrars have supported the recommendation for AusRegistry to keep the contract.

CoCCA and Espresso

The registry services platform, Espresso, is based upon CoCCA tools. It is one of the most widely used and deployed software. Over 20 high-level domains and more than 150 registrars have completely incorporated the platform. CoCCA is related to ccTLDs and Expresso is related to gTLD.

Mind + Machines and CoCCA

Mind + Machines has entered into an official agreement with CoCCA to develop the software for gTLDs together, though the resultant software remains to be Open Source.

Various business plans and other implementation schemes can be accommodated with the help of the upcoming combination of CoCCA and Expresso. Different languages such as English, French, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic can be chosen by TLD operators. The fundamental code is in Java. For resolution, Whois information and registration, it adheres to the engineering stipulation. It can be used with IDNs and it supports DNSSEC and IPv6.

CoCCA Registry ccTLDs users

The registry software is currently used by more than 35 TLD managers, including:

• Christmas Island (.cx)
• Afghanistan (.af)
• Dominica (.dm)
• Timor-Leste (.tl)
• Legacy (.TP)
• Mauritius (.mu)
• Norfolk Island (.nf)
• South Georgia (.gs)
• Namibia (.na)
• Mangolia (.mn) (Use under discussion)

The members at CoCCA aim and work towards developing administrative policies, technologies and models through consensus in order to bring improvement in the technical stability, interoperability, utility and technical stability of the ccTLDs members with DNS.