The new policy is welcome, writes Sonny Aragba-Akpore
The federal government last week released a policy directing all Ministries, Departments and Agencies, (MDAs) to migrate all their websites and electronic mails (e-mails) addresses to the Country Code Top-level Domain (ccTLD) names.
What this means is that instead of running government businesses with generic emails addresses like yahoo.com, Hotmail, Gmail, among others, all government workers and officers should deploy their emails and websites on the country code dot.ng.
The government policy is coming in after nearly 18 years of Nigeria joining the global regulator for domain names, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
The country joined ICANN about 18 years ago via the Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NIRA) under the auspices of the Nigerian Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA).
Founded on March 23, 2005, as a stakeholder-led organization, NIRA was charged with the management of Nigeria’s Country Code Top Level Domain Name (ccTLD), dot.ng. Coordinated by NITDA, the transfer of this important national resource on behalf of the federal government arose out of the country’s internet community.
Officials of NIRA said the advent of NIRA brought to an end the long years of controversy over.ng. It was President Olusegun Obasanjo’s intervention that ended this controversy.
The advent of NIRA in 2005 brought to an end over 12 years vacuum during which period the .ng was hosted first in Italy and later by an American Randy Bush, who was the technical contact for the .ng while Mrs Ibukun Odusote held office as the administrative contact.
NIRA’s constitution was adopted on March 28, 2006, and Dr. Isaac Odeyemi was elected as chairman of the Board of Trustees (BOT). The late Mr. Ndukwe Kalu was the pioneer head of the executive 10 – man board by May 1, 2007.
NIRA did not handle registration names directly but through registrars and registries and this was indeed a major bottleneck for the growth of ccTLD in Nigeria. So all the processes of registrations for.com.ng, .edu.ng .name.ng, .gov.ng, among others were slow because registrations took very long routes to get registered.
This is a possible reason while only 184,341 users registered in 17 years NIRA’s existence as of December 2021.The figure represents 0.000504353 of the world’s 365.5million registered and functional ccTLD. Nigeria has over 200 million population and over a 100million internet users.
Despite renewed efforts to encourage migration in the last 17 years, apathy by public and civil servants informed the lull in keying into the ccTLD names. Instead, many officials stayed glued to their generic names like yahoo, gmail. Hotmail, and others.
Strangely too, the multibillion-naira businesses in Nigeria, the country’s government service, banks, commercial activities have a very low online presence compared to other African countries.
For instance, South Africa with a population of 60.4 has 1.25m active registrations on its .za, Kenya’s 53.7million population has 93,446 registered.ke.
Perhaps Nigerians preference and addiction for foreign products may have informed the lowly adoption of .ng by business and government institutions and workers.
To register a dot.com address users pay a paltry =N=2,000 while dot.ng goes for as much as =N=11,000 and the premium websites go for as high as N1million.
That is why, the new policy for compliance to the ccTLD is a welcome development and now that it has been backed by government, it is clearly a welcome idea worth pursuing.
When Communications and Digital Economy Minister, Dr Isa Pantami addressed the media last week after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting in Abuja he said the government decided to release the policy and ordered all public institutions to obtain the second level domain from NITDA and migrate to the platform with immediate effect. The minister’s memo to FEC was clear on the direction to follow: “the use of private email like yahoo. Com, gmail.com Hotmail for official communications by government officials would no longer be tolerated”
The policy has been approved and it focuses more in mandating federal public institutions, MDAs, as long as they are government institutions to migrate from their generic addresses to the top-level domain.
The Domain Names System (DNS) enables users to easily find their ways on the internet through every computer’s unique name called Internet Protocol (IP) address. The DNS through the IP is easy to remember hence their flexibility in usage.
ICANN is responsible for the allocation of IP addresses and all ccTLD names. It coordinates the technical elements in conjunctions with various countries’ registrars and as a private, public partnership, ICANN is dedicated to preserving the operational stability of the internet, promoting competition, and achieving broad representation of global internet communities, developing policy appropriate to its mission through bottom-up consensus-based processes.
ICANN as a not-for-profit international organization with responsibility for internet protocol addresses grew out of a role performed by the United States (USA) government contract by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). ICANN performs IANA’s roles now and this new government policy will boost Nigeria’s membership of the global body.
Aragba-Akpore is a member of THISDAY Editorial Board
