African TLD issue sparks heated debate

African countries struggling to take over management of their country-code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) should invest in servers and training engineers to operate registries before complaining, said Ann Rachel Inne, Africa region liaison at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Some of the countries complaining about the TLD delegation process have not invested in the technology necessary to manage their own TLDs, Inne said. They lack databases showing how many domains exist under the country code, she said.

The issue caused heated debate at the Africa Telecommunications Union meeting held in Mauritius this week, attended by regulators and ccTLD managers.

Rwanda, Congo (Brazaville) and the Democratic Republic of Congo complained that their ccTLDs are operated by a Belgian living in Switzerland, and that pleas to ICANN for repatriation of the domain management have not yielded results.

The Rwanda ICT Association has been trying to redelegate management of the .rw TLD for two years, according to Pierre Claver Secyugu, a government delegate from Rwanda. "We hoped to complete the redelegation process in three months."

The annual cost of .a domain on .cg (for the DRC) is €245 (US$360), and no one knows where the servers are located or how many records are on the system, said Jean Philemon Kissangou, a delegate from the DRC.

Mauritius has one of the most developed ICT infrastructure in the continent, but Mohammed Asraf Ally Dulull, minister of Information and Communications Technology, said that country has yet to take management of the .mu domain from an individual operating in California with servers in different parts of the world.

"Every country has to conduct due diligence studies before starting the redelegation process; ICANN has to guarantee that the people holding the domains will not be switched off when management changes hands," Inne said.

Political instability has also affected the redelegation process because government ministers changed frequently, hold different views on the redelegation, and do not commit sufficient resources for the process, she said.

"There is a country that had 15 ministers during the application process and each minister gave different instructions," she said. "Obviously conflicting instructions contribute to the delay."

Out of 53 countries in Africa, only 10 have functional registries within the country, according to Eric Akumiah, the AfTLD administrative manager, based in Ghana.

Participants in the ATU meeting this week also discussed whether the TLD domains should be priced like generic domains such as .com or .net, whether they should be given free or should be handled by commercial agencies.

"It is important for a country to identify what model works; for instance .sc for Seychelles is ran by a private company and we are in discussions with the government on how to improve operations," said Gilbert Lebon, from Seychelles.

Participants underscored the need for government involvement in investing in ccTLDs as part of critical infrastructure.