The difficulty African nations have in managing their own ccTLDs was a focus for discussions at the Africa Telecommunications Union meeting held in Mauritius this week, attended by regulators and ccTLD managers according to Computerworld Kenya. African ccTLD managers were also accused of not investing in the infrastructure required to run ccTLDs.Computerworld says “African countries struggling to take over management of their ccTLDs should invest in servers and training engineers to operate registries before complaining, said Ann Rachel Inne, Africa region liaison at ICANN.”The report mentions a number of African nations are trying to recover the management of their ccTLDs from non-residents, such as “Rwanda, Congo (Brazaville) and the Democratic Republic of Congo [who have] 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.”In addition, the costs for some ccTLDs for registering a domain name a prohibitive for many locals, with “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.”To read more of this report in Computerworld Kenya, go to:
computerworld.co.ke/articles/2009/03/20/african-tld-issue-sparks-heated-debate