President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto during a past press briefing at State House on July 4, 2013. Photo/FILE
The regulator, CCK, has published draft framework and regulations
that would shake up the internet domain market in Kenya. Whereas it
has been its good practice to invite public comments on draft
regulations, it is rare that CCK will change too much from what it has
already drafted.
Given that it is impossible to do justice to the set of published documents in one blog, we shall for now only look at the broad principles for the anticipated market shape-up.
The current market structure is very simple in that all internet names registered in Kenya are managed under KENIC
– a multi-stakeholder institution that has representation from the
regulator, government, academia and private sector. In technical terms,
KENIC is the administrator of the country code, top-level domain
(ccTLD) known as “.KE” and pronounced as “dot KE”
Under
this dot.KE top-level domain, one would find a second-level of domains
such as “.co.ke” for company internet registrations, “.ac.ke” for
registered internet names for academic institutions, “.go.ke” for
registering internet names for government institutions amongst others.
Dr. Shem Odhuodho used to manage the Kenyan ccTLD before it was re-delegated to KENIC in 2002 after some lengthy process that involved the ICANN – the body that globally coordinates internet names and numbers.
Since,
then KENIC has managed to register only 30,000 internet names and
pressure has been mounting to see if competition in the market would
spur internet name registration to match say, South Africa and Egypt
–both of whom have over 200,000 internet name registrations.
The
regulator intends to invite applicants from the commercial sector to
bid for the administration and management of both the Kenyan ccTLD
(dot.KE) and its corresponding second-level domains such as the “co.ke”,
“.ac.ke”, “or.ke” amongst others.
The intentions seem
good – as always in Kenya – but the details or lack of them always raise
eyebrows. For example, it is not yet clear how the winning bidder or
applicant for the administration of the top level and second-level
domain names will be selected.
From the published
documents, it is not clear if the traditional auction approach or the
beauty pageant approach will be employed. In the auction approach, the
highest bidder for a service is expected to be selected while in the
beauty pageant approach, the one with the best contextual fit is
expected to win.
There is some mention of first-come
first served but this would be disastrous if it becomes the method of
determining who finally walks away with the rights to run the dot.KE
top-level and the second-level domains.
To understand
why the process is important, one can do some simple arithmetic by
considering that for each of the 30,000 registered domains, the
registrant is charged on average 2,000Ksh per year. This translates to a
cool 60Million Kenya shilling per year – a tidy sum considering the
growth potential and annually renewable fees.
It is
easy to concede that “one must know right people” in order to win such
type of government tenders or business in Kenya. Nevertheless, the
regulator should explicitly let the public and the applicants know how
such a winner will be arrived at.
I am currently in
consultation with the administrator of one the largest internet domains
in Africa and promise to bring you more insights next week.
Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT. Twitter : @jwalu
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