Legal hurdles cleared for ‘.africa’ domain to become available

The .Africa domain, which as its name suggests is expected to offer a continental web identity (something similar to what is offered by .EU domain) is now to be available to the general public after years of legal battles.

The .Africa domain name is expected to go on sale from the middle of 2017. The dispute responsible for the delay in .africa’s deployment originated when worldwide web administrator, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), awarded the .Africa domain to South Africa’s ZA Central Registry in 2014 after a bidding process. The move to implement the domain name was blocked when the only other bidder for the name, DotConnectedAfrica (DCA), a Nairobi-based organization went to court to undo the decision to give South Africa’s ZA Central Registry (ZACR) control of the domain.

This resulted in delays which finally came to an end in December after the DCA lost a second motion in a Californian court for a preliminary injunction to stop ICANN’s delegation of the domain name to ZACR, this ended the legal process.

The .Africa domain which is a top level domain is the last part of a web internet address, such as .com and .net. Top level domains are managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for use with the Domain Name System (DNS), where they form the last part of a recognized domain name.

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.africa is a geographic top level domain, meaning that its management is not country-specific. It can be used alongside country-specific domains such as .ke for Kenya and .ng for Nigeria. The .africa domain was intended as a distinctive pan-African identification for regional online operations when it is opened up for registration, similar to .eu for Europe and .asia for Asia.

This will see the registration of new domain names such as “ww.businessday.africa” available in the not so distant future.

There will be three phases in the launch of the domain; sunrise, landrush and general. The ‘sunrise’ phase will see intellectual property rights holders applying for their respective names. ‘Landrush’ applications follow and are usually for premium or sought-after domain names.

“All attempts to stall the public availability of the .africa gTLD have failed and it’s now time to create the next chapter in the .africa story,” said ZACR CEO Masilela.