Daily Independent Online.
*
Tuesday, June 22, 2004.
FG
to open internet site for Nigeria’s name registration
Shina Badaru
IT.Telecom Editor
Plans are afoot by the government to open a
website that would ease problems encountered by people hoping to sign up for
Nigeria’s .ng name on the Internet.
Daily Independent had exclusively
reported on the same day that Abuja has finally gained control over the
Nigerian Country Code Top Level Domain (.ng ccTLD) Name following a ratification
of its “redelegation” request by the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the global technical co-ordination body for
the Internet infrastructure.
Government aims to popularise Nigeria's .ng
name, the suffix that routes Nigerian bound messages and serves as the
country’s unique identifier on the global computer network.
Director General, National Information
Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Gabriel Ajayi, confirmed in an interview
that the government is opening a website to ease the difficulties encountered
in registering for Nigeria’s .ng name.
He said the agency has received complaints
that prospective sign-ups often come against problems with the current
Technical Contact Person, Randy Bush, who manages the server in the United
States.
NITDA plans a site that will ease the
process of registering for .ng that will be automated and interactive.
It will allow more individuals and
businesses to sign up for their messages to be routed to .ng web addresses,
Ajayi said, commending ICANN for the redelegation.
The transfer to NITDA, on behalf of the
government, called “redelegation” in technical parlance, ended an
eight-year dispute among stakeholders seeking to wrest control from
ex-administrative contact person, Ibukun Odusote, who also backed the status
change by ICANN.
The transfer took effect on June 9
following a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) entered into in April by ICANN
and NITDA.
ICANN President and Chief Executive Officer
Paul Twomey and NITDA Director General Olalere Ajayi jointly signed the MOU.
In it, ICANN now recognises NITDA as the .ng domain name
“manager”.
Prior to the ratification, ICANN had also
recognised Odusote as the in-country ‘Administrative Contact
Person’.
The MOU states that “ICANN hereby
recognises the Manager as the manager of the Delegated ccTLD during the term of
this MOU”.
It binds NITDA to “acknowledge that
ICANN is, and throughout the term of this MOU shall remain, the Internet
coordination entity responsible to the global Internet community for the
development of policies for the overall coordination of the Internet
domain-name system (DNS) in a manner that maintains it as a stable and
interoperable global naming system for the Internet”.
Following the development, the Internet
Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the body that manages the Internet
domain-name system root, on June 9 altered on its website the administrative
contact information created on March 15, 1995.
IANA also receives requests for delegation
and redelegation of top-level domains, investigates circumstances pertinent to
those requests and reports on them. It has modified its database to recognise
NITDA as both the “Sponsoring Organisation” and
“Administrative Contact” for the domain name.
However, United States-based Randy Bush of
RGnet, LLC remains the Technical Contact for the Nigerian domain name.
In appraising the government’s
request for the transfer, IANA stated: “The structure proposed by NITDA
and endorsed by the Nigerian Government is to have NITDA undertake management
of the .ng ccTLD under appropriate oversight of the Nigerian Government
concerning the national policy interests.
“NITDA and the Nigerian Government
also acknowledge and support ICANN's responsibility for coordinating management
of the DNS, including the .ng ccTLD, to safeguard global technical coordination
interests.
“In reviewing the request, in light
of the Nigerian Government's endorsement of NITDA as the appropriate manager,
and in view of achievement of agreements documenting the framework of
accountability described above, IANA concludes that the .ng ccTLD should be
redelegated to NITDA”.
President Olusegun Obasanjo had intervened
in the dispute when on Friday January 16 he convened a meeting of all
stakeholders to resolve it.
It pitted two information and communication
technology (ICT) bodies, the Nigeria Computer Society (NCS) and Nigeria
Internet Group (NIG), against each other. NCS endorses management by an autonomous
body, NIG insists it has a licence to manage the domain name.
The President directed that TLD, being a
national resource, should be managed by the government and that NITDA should
immediately assume custody of the .ng ccTLD.
He directed Odusote to transfer possession
and custody of the TLD to NITDA.
Obasanjo added that NITDA should set up a
non governmental organisation (NGO), representing the interest of the Internet
Community and ICT stakeholders, to manage the .ng ccTLD under the supervision
of NITDA.
Based on the directive, NITDA has called
for memoranda and position papers from the Internet community and the general
public “to forward submissions, memoranda and/or position paper on any
aspect of the .ng management”.
It plans to hold a national
stakeholders’ forum this month to collate opinion on the structure,
composition and proper name of the non-governmental institution to be created.
