As Africa continues its quest to catch up with the rest of the Internet world, a company in Ghana called Ghana Dot Com Limited, has become the third in Africa to become an accredited domain name registrar. Accreditation was awarded by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), an Internet oversight organization.

The two other African registrars are Internet Solutions of South Africa and Kheweul of Senegal. The Ghana registrar will now be authorized to register .com, .org, .net, and .info domains. The hope is that this will bring more business to Ghana and surrounding African nations. Ghana Dot Com also aims to encourage more locally-produced websites by people of the Ghana community.

“We hope that this venture will present a platform for hosting more localized content and in local languages to develop the African information resource market,” said Professor Nii Qaynor, Chairman of Ghana Dot Com.

In addition to registering domains, Ghana Dot Com will also host websites. One of their future goals is to become the registrar for country code top level domains (ccTLD) in Africa.

Source: Ghana News Agency
Photo: Flickr

Continue reading: Ghana Becomes Third African Nation to Register Domains

In keeping with the recent strong performance of the .de ccTLD, Aethiopien.de sold at auction for €17,850. The name is a Latin-character version of Äthiopien, the German name for Ethiopia. It would be interesting to see how much the IDN variant of the name might sell for at auction compared to this domain.

Other recent sales include:

u.to- $13,000 USD
superrealtors.com- $5,250 USD
lmj.com- €3,103
auto-shop.com- $2,888 USD
dominationphonesex.com- $1,100 USD

As far as the domain business is concerned, the holiday season is pretty slow. Six and seven-figure domains tend to be very expensive gifts.

Photo | Flickr

Continue reading: Aethiopien.de sells for €17,850

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a man widely considered to be the founder of the modern web, is embarking on a 4-day trip to Kenya. While there, he will collaborate with leaders about increasing Internet usage and also launch activities for the new World Wide Web Foundation.

The East African country has been host to a hotbed of Internet industry activity lately. The country has just been connected to a new cross-ocean fiber optic cable, significantly increasing the bandwidth available to the region. In 2010, it will host an ICANN meeting.

Currently, 8.6% of the population– 3.3 million Kenyans– has Internet access. This is a huge jump from the year 2000, when only 200,000 people, or 0.7% of the population, could access the web.

Source | Kenya Broadcasting Corporation

Continue reading: Web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee to visit Kenya

This week, a group of African communication ministers met in Johannesburg, South Africa to discuss the creation of a .africa TLD. The thing is, does the continent really need its own extension?

Maybe further down the road there will be a use for it, but considering Africa is the most unwired continent in the world, what’s the point? Instead of worrying about a regional TLD, countries in the area should be concerned with improving their own extensions and infrastructure.

Finally, “.africa” is too long for an extension. Why not .afr or .afca?

Continue reading: What's the point of .africa?

I can’t remember the last time Sudan made the news, but today is the exception with the sale of Sudan.com at auction for £73,516 ($120,000 USD).

Place names are excellent domain investments because while tastes change and products constantly enter and exit the market, countries rarely disappear and are always a subject of interest.

The domain Xoxide.com and site also sold for $76,000 USD. They were owned by a now closed Internet store selling computer cases and modding supplies.

Other recent sales:

jjj.com- $48,500
wordy.com- $20,000
prosensa.com- $19,000
lampen.com (German for “lamps”)- €13,800
wordplay.com- $12,000
shirtshop.com- $10,000

Source | Domain Name News

Continue reading: Sudan.com sells for $120,000

It hasn’t even been two months since Cameroon made its .cm domain available for public registration, but premium versions of the extension are selling like wildfire.

The biggest sales so far have been Hotels.cm and Sex.cm for £50,097 ($81,000 USD) and £31,542 ($51,000 USD) respectively. Other notable sales include:

taobao.cm- $35,100

mail.cm- $30,100

porn.cm- $23,050

coupons.cm- $20,100

free.cm- $17,800

pornhub.cm- $15,100

creditreport.cm- $11,100

insurance.cm- $10,200

youporn.cm- $10,100

lawyers.cm- $10,008

domain.cm- $9,580

These names are not necessarily selling as investments, but instead to make money through typosquatting. Hotels.cm, for instance, is a common typo for the popular hotel booking website Hotels.com. No doubt Cameroon is making quite a bit of money from these sales.

Source | The Domains

Continue reading: Premium .cm names sell at auction for big bucks

Most domain extension operators around the world, especially American TLDs, work with ICANN on some level, but a recent InfoWorld article shows that most African ccTLDs do not wish to work with the California organization, opting not to join its Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO).

Many of these domain registries are afraid to do so because of ICANN’s ties with the United States government. Many also misunderstand the requirements for joining. According to Vika Mpisane, head of the Africa Top Level Domain Organization (AfTLD):

Some African ccTLDs have kept away from the ccNSO because of the whole controversy of the ICANN Joint Partnership Agreement with the U.S. government. I get a sense there’s a slowly growing discomfort amongst some African governments with the continuing U.S. oversight over ICANN.

Compared to the rest of the world, Africa’s domain registration system is far behind. Most of its ccTLDs do not have an automated registration process, and may be subject to intervention from government officials. As more and more people from this region connect to the web, however, things are sure to change.

Photo | unseenob

Continue reading: African ccTLD operators careful to avoid ICANN

.DJ is the ccTLD for Djibouti, a small African country southeast of Somalia. With only 11,000 Internet users, the extension is scarcely used at all, and now a company is trying to market the name to DJs across the globe.

As is the case with .eco, I don’t see much of a target for the .DJ name. Sure, some generics like radio.dj and techno.dj are valuable, but does the average DJ need a premium domain? Having a site might be nice, but the price for a .dj registration is £39.99 a year. Disc jockeys do not make very much money, and I doubt most could justify the expense when a perfectly decent .com could be had for a fourth of the price.

In addition, any .dj registration must comply with Islamic moral standards. The country’s government, which is based on Islamic law, requires that no domain be “hurting, confusing, sexual, blasphematory, racist, [or] unecessarily provocative.”

A great deal of Western DJs more than likely play music that would offend more conservative cultures and some even have unsavory names. Would rap.dj violate the rules because many songs of that genre contain inappropriate language? What if a DJ catering to gay night clubs wanted to purchase gay.dj?

The idea sounds good on paper, but I just don’t see many DJs feeling the .DJ beat.

Continue reading: .DJ domain targets disc jockeys

Yesterday, an undersea SAT-3 cable was cut between the Iberian peninsula and West Africa. It is apparently the only line connecting West Africa to the digital world, and the cut caused connectivity problems in Benin, Togo, Niger, and Nigeria. Nigeria’s banking sector, government and mobile phone networks all suffered from bandwidth outage.

“SAT-3 is currently the only fibre optic cable serving West Africa,” explained Ladi Okuneye, chief marketing officer of Suburban Telecom, which provides the majority of Nigeria’s bandwidth.
“So all West African countries have to use it.”

The fibre optic cable is 15,000km (9,3000miles) long, connecting eight West African countries along is route to South Africa. 70% of Nigeria’s bandwidth is routed through Benin, causing it to suffer greatly from the cut. The company responsible for the network, Suburban Telecom, is sending a ship from South Africa to investigate. According to Okuneye, it could be two weeks before the ship arrives.

Source: BBC News
Photo: Flickr

Continue reading: West Africa struggles after cable cut

It hasn’t been long since Cameroon announced plans to offer its .CM domain to the world at large, but a number of premium names have already sold at auction.

So far the highest sale has been Cars.cm for £21,455 ($35,000 USD). The highest sales have all been generic names. Here are some others:

• jobs.cm- £6,130 ($10,000 USD)
• games.cm- £ 3,065 ($5,000 USD)
• juegos.cm- £3,065 ($5,000 USD)
• loan.cm- £3,065 ($5,000 USD)
• lasvegas.cm- £1,962 ($3,200 USD)
• date.cm- £613 ($1,000 USD)

I was a bit surprised by date.cm. I expected that to sell for a much higher price. Juegos.cm is Spanish for “Games.cm.” Normally foreign-word domains sell for less than their English counterparts, but in this case, both variations sold for 3,065.

Domainers also seem to be keeping away from trademarked domains for the most part, though there are exceptions. ABC.cm is just one trademarked name that has sold. It fetched £736 ($1200 USD).

Source: The Domains

Photo: Flickr

Continue reading: .CM auction results pile in

For years Cameroon’s government leased out the .cm domain to Agoga.com. Because .cm is a common typo of .com, the company set up a system where if you entered any address ending with .cm, it took you to a webpage filled with ads. Agoga made millions from this deal, profiting from domains like google.cm and weather.cm.

Now Cameroon has decided to end this special deal with Agoga and will open up the .cm domain to everyone. Starting July 15, you will be able to preorder a registration free of charge. Public registration begins on August 1. On August 4, the most lucrative .cm domains will be auctioned off. Normal registrations will cost £217 ($350 USD) for two years.

There is no doubt that Cameroon is trying to make money from typosquatters, crafty individuals who register common misspellings of popular websites in hopes of getting free traffic. Typosquatting often constitutes trademark infringement and is finable by up to £186,234 ($300,000 USD) in the United States.

Cameroon has made a very irresponsible decision regarding its domains. Many trademark holders will suffer as a result of the country’s attempt to make a quick buck. As developing countries build web infrastructure, their governments ought to learn to be more responsible.

Source | Tech Crunch
Photo | Flickr

Continue reading: .CM domains soon to be available for registration

With IPv4 addresses set to run out by 2011, Internet administrators have been pushing for a switch to the new IPv6 system. Unfortunately, very few data centers have adopted the new system because of past investments made in IPv4 and the cost to upgrade.

This is why some industry experts believe Africa, a continent that has made very little investment in IT infrastructure, may lead the world in IPv6 adoption. As Calvin Brown, director of Uniform, the company that administrates the .co.za domain, put it:

The rate of IPv6 adoption in Africa seems to be higher than in other regions. It seems that this may be an area where being behind can help us get ahead

In Kenya, IPv6 has been running on the .ke registry servers since 2006. Other countries, such as Ghana, have held forums and training seminars in an attempt to educate server administrators about the need to abandon IPv4, but few have made the switch to IPv6.

One of the benefits of starting late in any situation is the ability to gain from already acquired knowledge. Though Africa may be late to the technology game, it can learn from the West’s past mistakes and build its infrastructure with the newest equipment.

Source | Computer World

Photo | Flickr

Continue reading: Africa may lead the world in IPv6 adoption