[AfrICANN-discuss] The Untold Story of African ccTLDs

[Anne-Rachel Inné]

All, I thought you'd want to see and comment on the below. Among others, the
author claims in the last paragraph that " The map above shows the
country-code top-level domains (ccTLD) of the African continent. Africa has
more recognized countries than any other continent but only 10 of the ccTLDs
have functional registries within the African countries they belong to." You
can comment directly on their website, I did!
http://appfrica.net/blog/2009/12/02/the-untold-story-of-african-cctlds/

The Untold Story of African ccTLDs
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<http://www.flickr.com/photos/ww4f/4100846766/in/set-72157622795111374/>

In my Infostate of Africa
graphic<http://appfrica.net/blog/2009/11/13/infostate-of-africa/>I
tried to bring attention to one of the geekier problems facing Africa:
the
issue of country-code Top Level Domain (ccTLDs) and why only a fifth of
African countries own and control them. For those of you who aren’t sure
what this means, think .us, .uk, .nz, .jp etc. (United States, United
Kingdom, New Zealand, and Japan respectively), all those domains are owned,
controlled by and managed from the countries they represent. Not the case in
the majority of African countries.

In her post African TLD issue sparks heated
debate<http://www.computerworld.co.ke/articles/2009/03/20/african-tld-issue-sparks-heated-debate>,
Rebecca Wanjiku explains why…

African countries struggling to take over management of their country-code
Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) should invest in servers and training engineers
to operate registries before complaining, said Ann Rachel Inne, Africa
region liaison at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
(ICANN).Some of the countries complaining about the TLD delegation process
have not invested in the technology necessary to manage their own TLDs, Inne
said. They lack databases showing how many domains exist under the country
code, she said.

This has lead to many of Africa’s ccTLD’s to be managed and operated by
foreign private companies or individuals.

Rwanda, Congo (Brazaville) and the Democratic Republic of Congo complained
that their ccTLDs are operated by a Belgian living in Switzerland, and that
pleas to ICANN for repatriation of the domain management have not yielded
results.

The Rwanda ICT Association has been trying to redelegate management of the
.rw TLD for two years, according to Pierre Claver Secyugu, a government
delegate from Rwanda. “We hoped to complete the redelegation process in
three months.”

Mauritius has one of the most developed ICT infrastructure in the continent,
but Mohammed Asraf Ally Dulull, minister of Information and Communications
Technology, said that country has yet to take management of the .mu domain
from an individual operating in California with servers in different parts
of the world.

*Africa’s ccTLDs* – .ao, .bf, .bi, .bj, .bw, .cd, .cf, .cg, .ci, .cm, .cv,
.dj, .dz, .eg, .eh, .er, .et, .ga, .gh, .gm, .gn, .gq, .gw, .ke, .km, .lr,
.ls, .ly, .ma, .mg, .ml, .mr, .mu, .mw, .mz, .na, .ne, .ng, .re, .rw, .sc,
.sd, .sh, .sl, .sn, .so, .st, .sz, .td, .tg, .tn, .tz, .ug, .za, .zm, .zw

The map above shows the country-code top-level domains (ccTLD) of the
African continent. Africa has more recognized countries than any other
continent but only 10 of the ccTLDs have functional registries within the
African countries they belong to. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
now allows sponsored top level domains. .ASIA is one of them. Could this
pave the way for the .AFRICA sTLD?
 *
*
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