South Africaâs ccTLD has cemented its position as the leading ccTLD on the African continent passing the 1.2 million registrations mark across all their second level domains in recent days
South Africaâs ccTLD has cemented its position as the leading ccTLD on the African continent passing the 1.2 million registrations mark across all their second level domains in recent days.
âSouth Africaâs SLDs, with their impressive 1.2 million total registrations, have cemented .ZAâs standing as one of the worldâs most popular namespaces and successfully capped ZACRâs third decade serving the South African and global Internet consumer,â says ZACR CEO, Lucky Masilela. The co.za SLD alone currently has over 1,117,000 registrations.
South Africa, a country of 57 million people and the leading economy on the continent, is the leading domain name market on the continent. By way of comparison, Nigeria, a country of 190 million people, has notched up 102,000 registrations within its .ng country code top level domain.
Mr Masilela puts the runaway success of co.za down to the globally proven âTriple Râ model adopted in 2010 and to which the local domain name sector continues to adhere, with clearly obvious and positive results. The Triple R Model is based on the separation of functions and responsibilities by the Regulator the Registry Operator and the Registrar.
âOur current model is the reason South Africa boasts the highest number of Africaâs domain name registrations coupled with our intention to keep the domain costs as low as possible on the continent,â explains Mr. Masilela.
The ZACR as the Central Registry is responsible for the technical wellbeing of South Africaâs presence on the worldwide web, and their Central Registry model championed by the late Communications Minister, Dr Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, has emerged as a local centre of excellence of which all South Africans can be proud.
ZACR has a solid history of pioneering achievements within the domain name sector. It is a previous winner of the Best African Registry category awarded by ICANN and was recently awarded the rights to administer the entire African continentâs presence on the worldwide web in the form of the .africa geographic Top Level Domain (gTLD).
Under .za the second level domains are co.za, web.za, net.za and org.za. ZACR also manages a number of new generic/geographic generic top level domains: .joburg, .capetown and .durban as well as .africa.
âEvery leading local brand has to register a co.za domain name or risk losing valuable IP and cyber real estate to competitors, speculators or worse,â concludes Mr Masilela.