I often think of web services I’d like to be able to use. Often these services don’t exist (yet) or aren’t easy to find if they do. While trying to find these services, I ask myself what I would call the service if I had created it – or if I were to create it. The reasoning behind this is, of course, that if the service exists and has an obvious name, which I have guessed correctly, I will find it quickly.
Thinking along these lines yesterday, I realised that several obvious domains for these services could make good use of TLDs other than the usual .com, .org, .net, and so on. Specifically, they could have benefitted from .ly or .ng . So I looked into registering domains with these and discovered that in the first case it wouldn’t be affordable for me and in the second it wouldn’t be straightforward.
.ng is the Nigerian ccTLD, and although there exists a Nigeria Internet Registration Association with a form to help potential registrants register their “domains”, it in fact only allows the registration of subdomains below .com.ng, .edu.ng, .gov.ng, .net.ng and .org.ng . So even if I had the most interesting site in the world, I couldn’t do something cool like host it at http://interesti.ng .
I think that’s a little crazy, because Nigeria could start making quite a healthy income from registrants who would be willing to pay for domains like that.
There’s another snag too: .ng is what’s known as a “closed” ccTLD, meaning that it’s supposed to only be used by organisations based in, or with a presence in, Nigeria. There has been high level criticism of the concept of “closed” ccTLDs for some time now, and I think much of it is valid. After all, what counts as a “presence in Nigeria” – or in any other country, for that matter? The registrar and hosting provider Web4Africa gives some guidance, and so do other sites, but it’s very vague. If I use a DNS server in Nigeria to host my domain, does that count as my having a physical presence there? I think it should, just as if I were renting an office there. But it’s not clear if it does. What is clear is that checking whether or not I have a physical presence in Nigeria is done manually. This means that Nigerian domain registration can’t happen quickly. That in turn means that there won’t be a Nigerian Go Daddy any time soon. Go Daddy is the largest domain registrar in the world by some margin, at the time of writing. It has built its business in large part, if I’m not mistaken, on its ability to perform automated domain registration. This is an opportunity that’s effectively denied to Nigerian registrars because of .ng’s closed status.
I should note at this point that I’m not a fan of all Go Daddy’s moral principles – here’s why – and for this reason, I avoid using Go Daddy (currently, I use Dreamhost and 123-reg for domain registration, but there are plenty of other good registrars about). But I do not believe that those ethics were necessary for the success of the business. What was necessary was a legal and technological infrastructure that permitted the automated registration of domains. This, and the ability to register whateveryoulike.ng, is all I am proposing herein that Nigeria should provide.
Another name I had in mind for a web service ended in .ly – the Libyan TLD. Here, the state of affairs is more promising, but still not quite ideal. There seems to be only one .ly registrar with a working web site in English: the intriguingly-named Libyan Spider Network. It seems that I could register whateverIwant.ly without too much trouble. The biggest snag is the price tag: $150 per year (for comparison, a .com typically costs $5-$15 per year). Clearly, what’s needed here is some competition. With a few more registrars in the marketplace, that price would likely fall to something a pauper like me could afford for a fledgling, unfunded web service.
Is there, you ask, a ray of sunshine in the ccTLD domain business? Well, yes. ccTLDs like .us, .uk, .jp, etc, are available through vast numbers of registrars. Competition keeps the prices low and the service reasonable (although there are opportunities to be fleeced if you’re foolish). But there are some great success stories from non-developed economies too. Tuvalu’s .tv ccTLD is wildly popular and widely available. Another island state with a thriving domain name business is São Tomé, whose .st TLD is modestly priced and available through a very efficient-looking site.
These cases highlight the shortcomings of Nigeria’s system. I don’t know why Nigeria doesn’t follow these other countries’ examples, and I wish it would.
The spirit behind the .ng TLD’s closed system I believe, is serve the residents of Nigeria (Nigerian + foreign entities in Nigeria). The .ng TLD is still hugely unporpular due to several years of poor management but things are beginning to pick-up a little bit now that the management is in the hands of some institutions.
Lets hope that things improve even more, when the registry has accredited some Nigerian companies as registrars for the TLD. Then, the TLD would explode and become much more popular since the market will become very competitive.
About registeri.ng, that might come to pass but for now, things stay the way they are.
I have a few blog posts on my personal blog, relating to .ng domains and every else about it.
Hi Oluniyi,
Thanks for the comment. I guessed as much about the reasoning behind the adoption of a closed ccTLD system, and also the possible reasons for .ng registration’s current state of affairs.
The former, I think, is still a mistake: a better approach would be to have an open ccTLD but with strict domain-squatting enforcement. This would allow internet entrepreneurs from any country to register *.ng domains for legitimate use (i.e. rather than squatting/ad sites), and since they’d probably prefer .ng rather than .com.ng, etc, there would almost certainly be plenty of domain namespace left for Nigerian companies with “ordinary” (rather than “web 2.0″) names to choose from. Opening .ng to all potential registrants would create a boom sector in the Nigerian economy, with a steady flow of income from international registrants whose .ng sites succeeded. So it could be a better approach, economically , for Nigeria, than keeping the ccTLD closed. I think other countries with open TLDs and sensible regulation of their domain registration market have demonstrated the viability of this approach more than adequately.
As for the other point, “poor management”, as you put it. I see you’ve written about that here. There’s also an interesting forum discussion about the issue here.
It’s good to hear that things are picking up on this front. I’m going to subscribe to your RSS feed to keep myself updated.
Thanks again,
spk
Hello,
.ly domain names are $75 now.
Regards,
Hadi Naser