Will .Africa Go the .Asia Way?

[Adam Dicker]

.Eu was a failure, .Asia an even bigger disaster. But the failure of these two continent-TLDs hasn’t stopped the African Union Commission to apply for a .Africa TLD under the aegis of the ZA Central Registry (ZACR). In an interview with ZACR representative, Fabrice Djossou, IT News Africa reveals that plans to create a TLD [...]

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[elevatoria]

It is a good thing to have .africa, though Africans are not internet incline or let me say domain's incline. But I believe things will gradually improve in the continent. I see this as a good development.

[katherine]

People never learn. They couldn't articulate one single reason why it would be a success, however there are tens of reasons why we know it's going to be another expected failure.

[elevatoria]

Failure or not! I just believed that it is a good thing to have it first, then history will have it on record. Cheers.

[jmcc]

.Eu was a failure, .Asia an even bigger disaster. But the failure of these two continent-TLDs hasn’t stopped the African Union Commission to apply for a .Africa TLD under the aegis of the ZA Central Registry (ZACR). In an interview with ZACR representative, Fabrice Djossou, IT News Africa reveals that plans to create a TLD [...]

The .eu failure was due to the idiocracy (great movie) of the European Commission giving the .eu to a small ccTLD registry to operate, failing to create a proper regulatory framework and the bumbling of Eurid to actually enforce regulations. However it still has about 3.5 million domains. Most of them are brand protection registrations but in terms of business and development, it is not a primary or core TLD. The .asia sTLD had a different problem - no coherent identity and a highly contested set of ccTLD markets in .asia's target market. However .africa may have a chance because it is occurring in what is an early market phase for the internet markets in many African countries. Most new TLDs succeed (rarely) by offering an alternative to the existing core TLDs (typically .com and the local ccTLD) or by getting the timing right. With many African ccTLDs still developing, a .africa TLD could provide a partial alternative so that a a .com/.ccTLD/.africa core TLD set could develop. However that's being optimistic as such development could take a decade at least.

Regards...jmcc

[Mark Talbot]

The thing about .countrycodes is they are by virtue of themselves a good idea,.. with one exception.

Things beyond .threeletters are too much for the common user to fathom.

And they still in this day and age have to get over .com.

[elevatoria]

Africa has never been given such opportunity on internet before, and the level of internet users in the continent continue to grow on daily basis and we never had any Domainer in Africa before, and we are now having them on daily as well; I think the .africa could be a success at long run. It may not be immediatelly but I see it as a good initiative to have .africa. I was thinking about it and just as I came here, I found the topic.

[RobM]

It will be great for the registry and registrars. It will be another money-sink and hard lesson for new domainers.

[Mark Talbot]

It will be great for the registry and registrars. It will be another money-sink and hard lesson for new domainers.

Only the new domainers really it will effect and steal their money. I agree.

The old grey-backs have long since tired of dumping money into new extensions and only buy the highest of quality of new names if they do stray from the .coms.
But domains are still something new to alot of people, so there is still an untapped resource of new money for the registrars to pick pockets from.

[holypeter]

Only the new domainers really it will effect and steal their money. I agree.

The old grey-backs have long since tired of dumping money into new extensions and only buy the highest of quality of new names if they do stray from the .coms.
But domains are still something new to alot of people, so there is still an untapped resource of new money for the registrars to pick pockets from.

we can never fully understand or know until we give it a trial.failure or success have lessons

[CureCancer]

Huge Fail!

[holypeter]

Huge Fail!

thanks for your concern for africa

[KING dot NET]

I think this will work just fine. Cheers to .Africa

I hope they will priority their citizen who cant afford a domain.
Best of luck.

[SBDomains]

It is pretty funny to me, when people who doesn't live in Europe says that .eu was a big disaster. .eu is used by pretty much companies even in my small country (Lithuania) and as I see it is very popular at Germany, so .eu is not a big disaster. Just nothing too special.

And as for .africa I have these Pre-Registrations:

Chat.africa

Games.africa

Live.africa

And I guess Chat.africa and Games.africa really could be pretty good.

[Jeroen]

There's an error in the article:

This map from Appfrica shows the number of domain registrations across various African countries:

The numbers denote population, not domain registrations.

[jmcc]

It is pretty funny to me, when people who doesn't live in Europe says that .eu was a big disaster. .eu is used by pretty much companies even in my small country (Lithuania) and as I see it is very popular at Germany, so .eu is not a big disaster. Just nothing too special.

The .eu ccTLD is a big disaster for the EU. It is used as a replacement for .com in some new EU countries but it is at .biz level of development (people often don't even bother to set up their .eu in DNS) in most of the EU countries. The .com/.ccTLD axis dominates most EU countries and .eu is very much a non-core TLD. As for Germany, they may have over 1M .eu domains registered but they don't bother to use .eu for websites. The last major web survey of .eu domains showed that it was used more as a gateway to ccTLD or .com domain websites and that genuine .eu web development was quite low. Also in an interesting turn of events, Dotster, one of the biggest .eu landrush speculators dropped around 20K .eu domains that it had held since the .eu landrush via an Irish front company specifically set up for cyberwarehousing. The Irish .eu count went from just over 51K in April to 31K on 01 May 2012.

And as for .africa I have these Pre-Registrations:

Chat.africa

Games.africa

Live.africa

The gTLD hasn't even launched yet. (I don't think that there's even been an accepted application.)

Regards...jmcc

[untitled]

I don't see this extension going any other way. I believe we are way over the maximum capacity of extensions for domains as it is, and a full word extension like .africa seems quite silly. But where there is any kind of profit to be made, you can be sure that people will try to seize it.

[draggar]

It's a huge win for the registry - they'll get a huge influx of registrations and auction fees during sunrise and initial registration periods.

But - I'm willing to bet at least 95% of those registrations will not be renewed.

[mosesabbey]

Africa is a new territory and good market for domain names.In my opinion there is a future considering the emerging population of new internet users.

[katherine]

It's interesting to note that most African TLDs are underutilized. .za is the only major extension, a few others are doing okay but registration numbers are not very high (compared to European extensions for example).
Quite a few African extensions have just a few hundreds registrations, sometimes even less than one hundred if you look at the poorer countries like Chad.

Does not mean there is a market for .africa: imo it suffers from the same relevancy problem as .asia as it covers a large territory with little pan-continental sentiment. But people like to dream