A warm welcome to this, our second official newsletter!
It’s been an exceptionally busy past two weeks, following the team’s return from a very successful ICANN meeting in Prague, Czech Republic.
Our focus has shifted towards increasing our online footprint and assisting our
AUC (African Union Commission) partners in preparing for the
African Heads of States summit in Addis Ababa. Needless to say our official application for the dotAfrica (.Africa) Top Level Domain features high on the Agenda and is instilled in the hearts and minds of our leaders.
Our attention is also focused on the upcoming
East African IGF in Nairobi and the
AFTLD Annual General Meeting (AGM) in Livingstone, Zambia. Close on the heels of these events is the
3rd Annual African Peering Interconnection Forum (AfPIF) to be held in Johannesburg, South Africa. dotAfrica will have a significant presence at these events, ensuring that the visibility of this collaborative pan-African project receives the attention and awareness it deserves.
I am exceptionally proud of the dotAfrica team for all their hard work and successes to date. We still have a long way to go and many challenges to face but, with a fantastic, pan-African and international team behind us, I believe we are destined for success.
Until next time...
Please feel free to give us
feedback or suggestions on how we can improve the communiqué for your reading pleasure.
By
BiztechAfrica - June 27, 2012, 11:26 a.m.
The ZA Central Registry, now canvassing support at
ICANN 44, says its winning the right to administer
.africa would benefit the whole continent.
UniForum, trading as the
ZA Central Registry (ZACR) is at ICANN 44 in Prague this week, seeking support for the ZACR bid to administer the new .africa generic Top Level Domain (gTLD)
ZACR Steering committee members are driving home the point that ICANN recently confirmed that
only the ZA Central Registry has applied to administer the new .africa gTLD. Another bidder, Dot Connect Africa Trust (DCA), has applied for a gTLD called "dotafrica".
Octavia Kumalo, PR and marketing head for ZACR, says there has been confusion among delegates at ICANN 44 over the two Africa-related strings, but that ZACR is seeing huge support from the 1000-plus delegates at the event.
"
People are loving us," Kumalo says. "We even ran out of marketing collateral this week."
Whether this enthusiasm will translate into the right to administer the gTLD cannot be said. Khumalo says all applicants are now engaged in a waiting game to find out who will be awarded administration rights.
The application process, which began in November last year, has seen
substantial investments made by all applicants, including a
USD185K application fee. Recouping this investment will only begin once an applicant has been awarded the rights to administer a gTLD.
At around USD18 per annum for a domain, the resulting income may not seem like much, but Khumalo points out that
in South Africa alone, over 800 000 sites are using the .co.za domain. In Africa, with
54 countries and an
exponentially-growing online presence, the potential
revenue generated by the TLD would be huge.
"
And the important thing about ZACR’s bid is that UniForum is a non-profit organisation," Kumalo points out. "Therefore,
the revenue generated from .africa domains will go right back into community development across Africa."
Kumalo says these development projects are likely to include
enterprise development with an ICT slant, extensive ICT access
projects at schools, and
local digital content development.
"You’ll also see significant
development of the African registrar market," says Kumalo. There are currently only a handful of ICANN-accredited registrars in Africa; and when this number is grown, there will be a resulting
increase in jobs and
business opportunities too."
"Right now, we’re very excited," she says. "
This is an opportunity for Africa to stand out and be noticed."
