[AfrICANN-discuss] Who controls the internet?

[SM]

Hi Mark,
At 01:18 19-10-2012, Mark Elkins wrote:
>If I look at ZA or more specifically CO.ZA and give reasons why it works
>reasonably well...
>
>Cost: Currently this is pretty low - around the $6 level. Probably would

I did a quick summary of pricing but I did not post the 
figures.  co.za was the lowest.

>make little difference until the price was above $30. Hosting a fair
>sized website in South Africa is from $100 to $300 a year - so 10% of
>that for a Domain is probably reasonable.

Some of the ccTLDs charge more than USD 100 for registration.

>Accessibility: I think this is the key issue regarding ccTLD's. If its
>easy and quick to register, then people will use it.

Yes.

>Reliability: CO.ZA Nameservers have never been down. The Registration
>portal has been down - but never long. However, some people measure
>reliability by how well e-mail (etc) work. Most SA ISP's are quite
>reliable, so 'co.za' e-mail addresses work reasonably well (we have our
>moments).

.za has three nameservers within South Africa.  co.za has at least 
three nameservers within South Africa.  It seems geared to serve the 
local community.  Some application (excluding email) designers set a 
number and work out the optimization from there.  If the DNS side has 
high latency it can be a significant problem.

Regards,
-sm