The
managers of .Africa on Tuesday said that the domain is now open to the
public following three previous roll-out phases in which registration
was limited to governments, trademark owners and those willing to pay
top dollar for high-demand addresses.
African governments were
the first to be invited to reserve names which might be of national
importance, sensitive, or offensive.
From April 4 to June 2,
the domain went through its sunrise period during which registration was
only open to organisations that wanted to protect trademarks or other
priority rights.
Africa
is one of a new batch of domains, part of the Internet community’s
efforts to expand the options available to companies beyond commonly
known generic Top Level Domains (for example .com or .org) and country
code top level domains (for example .ke for Kenya or .ug for Uganda).
The
managers of .Africa on Tuesday said that the domain is now open to the
public following three previous roll-out phases in which registration
was limited to governments, trademark owners and those willing to pay
top dollar for high-demand addresses.
“The floodgates
have finally been thrown open and .Africa domains are now available for
registration on a first-come, first-served basis,” said Lucky Masilela,
CEO of South Africa’s ZA Central Registry (ZACR), tasked with managing
the domain. “… Africa’s new home on the Internet is now available for
occupation.”
The Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 2011 decided to allow the expansion of the
domain name system. The rationale was to increase competition and
provide users more choice by providing more specific endings for web
addresses. So hypothetically medical facilities could choose to register
a .hospital web address and hospitality firms could go for .hotel.
One
of these new top level domains was .Africa. The domain is supposed to
appeal to companies and individuals that want to associate themselves
with the continent.
African governments were the first
to be invited to reserve names which might be of national importance,
sensitive, or offensive. From April 4 to June 2, the domain went through
its sunrise period during which registration was only open to
organisations that wanted to protect trademarks or other priority
rights.
In the land rush phase, which ran from June 05 to June
30, an auction was carried out for domain names that were in high demand
or contested.
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