Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA), regulator of Nigeria’s internet space this morning crashed the cost of .ng, Nigeria’s premium domain names from N7.5 million to N15,000 only in order to increase the use of indigenous registered websites.
Nigeria’s .ng is the country code top level domain (ccTLD) name, a suffix for identifying Nigeria on the internet as approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the global regulator and manager of the internet. Nira registers an average of 700 domain names through its accredited registrars.
Chief Operating Officer of NiRA, Mr. Ope Odusan speaking to LEADERSHIP yesterday said the premium domain names which are in platinum and trademark types would be sold for N15,000 starting 8.00am today (Tuesday) following the approval granted by Nira’s Board of Trustees to populate the domain names.
“People don’t understand that .ng is Nigeria’s internet identifier on the internet. It is important that people have .ng instead of .com, org and .net web suffixes. Over 300,000 domain names are registered by Nigerians yearly leading to capital flight in excess of N300 million excluding the cost of packaging, hosting and fixing antivirus solutions on the sites.”
He said an average foreign domain name is registered for about $7. If you multiply that over a period of years, add the cost of hosting, designing and security solutions, it is a huge cost. We need to think about it. We have .ng, a unique domain name which we can use to get foreign money back to our country. If we have one million domain names sold to foreigners at $5 it is a huge investment into our economy.”
Odusan spoke yesterday at a media briefing on its forthcoming two-day forum April in Lagos, with the theme: ‘Sustaining Local Internet Content, the Way Forward for Nigeria”, to facilitate increased Nigerian content on the internet, the hosting of such content locally, and an increased adoption of .ng as the domain name of choice, particularly among Nigerians.
The forum is a collaboration of Internet eXchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN) and NIRA aimed at addressing the dearth of internet content hosted and produced locally in Nigeria and encourage a new hosting ratio of 80:20 in favour of Nigeria in particular and Africa in general.
The Managing Director IXPN, Muhammed Rudman said the predominance of the adoption of .com and .co.uk still holds sway due highly to some misconceptions about the .ng country code Top Level Domain.?? IXPN embodies the physical network infrastructure that allows Internet Service Providers (ISPs), operators, educational institutions and other IP-centric organisations to exchange data traffic between their respective networks.
The key role of the IXPN is to allow networks to interconnect through the exchange, providing the necessary environment to keep local Internet traffic local, stable and reliable. The organisers asserted that the benefits to all the networks, operators and end-users are a reduction in costs, latency, and increased speed among others.