More on afTLDs

Following some great feedback, I thought I’d expand on my last post on ccTLDs. First, however it came across, the post wasn’t intended to be accusatory towards IANA or ICANN. There are indeed real problems with some of the countries registries. However, as one of the commentors, McTim wrote, “It’s not as black and white as you put it.”

One source, who works with ICANN candidly explained some of the troubles various country registries face internally, which leads them to outsource most of the ‘heavy lifting’ to other companies (often foreign). Some of these problems are due to high turn-over, lack of infrastructure, lack of funding and in many cases, lack of training. The most problematic of these being related to turn-over and training. Large amounts of money are spent preparing country registries to take over TLD management, but later when changes need to be implemented, the trained staff has often been replaced, meaning new training efforts have to be arranged.

This still doesn’t change the fact that African countries should own, operate and manage their TLD namespaces and underlying infrastructure. It just needs to be said that in most countries, it’s not like they’ve been ’stolen’ or ‘hijacked’. In most scenarios, someone with authority has made a sovereign choice, for better or for worse. More than anything, poor and ill-prepared governance is actually the issue.

Anne-Rachel Inne from ICANN writes:

Some African registries may have technical operations out of the continent (there are several and for different reasons), but what counts is that the Sponsoring Organisation and the Administrative contacts are in country. So you may perhaps inquire in those countries having technical operations out of their countries why that is the case.

As for the fact that a ccTLD is managed by an inidividual or an organisation, when it is well done, there is no difference. When and if the commnunity calls for a different management formula, and it does what is required for the domain to be redelegated, its been done. Ask Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya among others.

McTim writes:

Here in Kenya, the ccTLD is administered by KENIC, which is a multistakeholder body that acts in the public interest in running the ccTLD. However, the GoK has decided that they should be the ones who determine who run 2nd level domain registries under .ke (think co.ke). This undermines KENIC and may allow those who have influence to capture a 2nd level registry. The GoK is currently in the process of promulgating regulations regarding this.

Another recent case can be seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.il#Censorship_in_th… Not only was the UAE blocking israelis from getting a .ae domain name, but they blocked all access to .il domains until recently: http://opennet.net/blog/2009/11/uae-unblocks-acce…

Many of us believe that governments have far too much influence in Internet Governance issues as it is, and think that ccTLD policies should be made by the Internet Community of that ccTLD (which can include people who aren’t citizens of that country or citizens living abroad), and NOT by the government of the country.

What about .ug, would you really want the CCK or the Ministry of ICT to run .ug? Despite what you think about a private, for profit registry, I would rather have a technically competent company who is NOT subject to political influence running the nameservers, especially in a country with a history of censorship.

There’s also the issue of security. The same source also points out that an improperly run registry is dangerous beyond just the borders of that particular country. In the case of Cameroon’s .cm, McAfee recently declared it as the world’s riskiest domain. NextWeb writes:

Cameroon, a small African country that borders Nigeria, jumped to the number one spot this year with 36.7 percent of the .cm domain posing a security risk, but did not even make the list last year. Because the domain .cm is a common typo for .com, many cybercriminals set up fake typo-squatting sites that lead to malicious downloads, spyware, adware and other potentially unwanted programs.

You can find out more about African top-level domains at afTLD.org.

Above photo of Vint Cerf used under the CC from Flickr.