The African Union is working to establish a continental internet registry that will allow private and governmental entities to use a single domain — such as .africa — to attract traffic to their websites.
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Residents from the village of Embakasi, 25 kilometres from Nairobi, walk to a solar-powered mobile internet cafe fashioned from a shipping container. [Tony Karumba/AFP]
So far, 44 African countries out of 54 have endorsed the project, including Tanzania, Kenya and Djibouti, according to domain managing company UniForum Association.
The initiative will help the continent achieve greater visibility on the internet but will not necessarily lead to economic growth, analysts say.
“Establishing a single internet domain will ease the flow of information across the continent since no technical barriers of negotiating from one national domain to the next will be experienced,” said Charles Ryoba, a Nairobi-based information technology (IT) consultant.
“It will also be beneficial to smaller countries like South Sudan whose IT infrastructure is still underdeveloped since the whole programme will trigger technological awareness and growth,” he told Sabahi.
Once the regional domain is established, national domain names will follow the continent’s domain name in website addresses. For instance, if .africa is chosen as the continent’s single domain name, websites in Kenya will end in .africa.ke, Tanzania .africa.tz, Ghana .africa.gh, and so on.
Tiberius Barasa, managing director of Kenya’s Centre for Policy Research, says a single domain will also help governments fight crime.
“Unlike in the current system where the various interfaces in the flow of data help to conceal the address of origin, with a single domain, the source is easily traceable, which will help the government in the fight against counterfeiters and fraudsters,” he told Sabahi.
Barasa said organisations selling items purported to be artefacts from Africa will have a tough time doing so since the single domain will become the global online signature for anything African.
“It will also be easier for East African governments to harmonise information technology services,” he said.
Despite the general positive reception to the single domain idea, Francis Bett, a Nairobi-based software engineer, says the initiative will not necessarily lead to tangible economic benefits for Africa.
“The world is going global and businesses want to adopt identities that give them a global as opposed to regional [reach],” Bett said. “[A continental] domain will have political benefits since it will give Africans an online identity, other than that, its very existence will be going against the spirit of the internet, which is making the world a global village.”
Although Europe and Asia have regional domains, they have not led to a significant economic impact on the global scene, Bett told Sabahi. Africa’s single domain is expected to become the third continental top level domain after .eu for Europe and .asia for Asia.
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) policies stipulate that any firm applying to administer a regional domain must have the endorsement of at least 60% of the countries within that region.
UniForum and Kenyan non-profit DotConnectAfrica are the two remaining companies bidding to manage the Africa regional domain. The companies applied to ICANN for licensure and the winner will be announced in the first quarter of 2013, when the registry is expected to take place.
Article source: http://sabahionline.com/en_GB/articles/hoa/articles/features/2012/08/16/feature-02. Creative Commons (CC)
