KazNIK's misinterpretation of rules caused closure of google.kz

Kazakhstan Association of IT-companies, which is the administrator of .kz domain, has explained the situation around the Communication Ministry's demand to physically relocate the servers of all .kz Internet-resources to the territory of Kazakhstan, Tengrinews.kz reports citing Nurlan Issin, President of Kazakhstan Association of IT-companies. The new rules of registration, use and distribution of domain space of Kazakhstan Internet sector dated September 7, 2010, have the requirement that servers of .kz Internet-resources have to be physically based at the territory of Kazakhstan. This requirenment is intended to facilitate development of Kazakhstan Internet-resources. It was agreed in the process of preparation and discussion of these rules that the “law is not retrospective” principle would be applied. This means that the rules are not supposed to be applied to domain names registered before the the new rules took effect. In particular, the Decree of Kazakhstan Ministry of Communications and Information dated September 7, 2010, states that “domain names registered before implementation of this decree, are not subject to re-registration and shall be valid until expiry of their registration.” However, officials of KazNIK (Kazakhstan Center of Network Information) have misinterpreted the concept of registration expiry and started pointing at the procedure of annual payment for prolongation of registration. This triggered a flow of wrong notifications to the registrants of .kz domains. Kazakhstan Association of IT-companies has notified that the requirement to locate servers of .kz Internet-resources at the territory of Kazakhstan does not apply to domains registered before the new rules came into effect. However, administration of .kz domain will always welcome the free-will decisions of registrants to relocate their servers to Kazakhstan. Meanwhile, misinterpretation of the rules caused the owner of the leading search engine Google to announce closure of Kazakh version of the website because of legal limitations implemented by local authorities. Users accessing google.kz are now automatically redirected to www.google.com in the Kazakh language. Internet-corporation noted that “this means that Kazakhstani users will experience a reduction in search quality as results will no longer be customized for Kazakhstan.”