Bids are now being accepted on the creation of .africa Internet domain name.The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will soon allow domain names being registered in almost dot-anything .
“It's easy for them to identify, versus now dot-com. Nobody knows where that is.They have to read through the website to understand that it's based in Africa and the product could probably be from somewhere else and so forth. So, it's a great advantage of categorization and grouping and competition,”said Sophia Bekele,CEO of DotConnectAfrica.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will start accepting new domain name application in January 2012.It is expected the competition to be fierce .
“The vision will come once you have something, right?.So we're thinking that the .africa vision will be an individual vision, for individuals and for corporations. Who knows how they'll take it to the next level, aside from just reserving the name. Microsoft.africa means something,” added Bekele .
ICANN's manager of regional affairs for Africa ,Anne-Rachel Inne said :
"“Africa, for the longest time, has been basically not present on the Internet because of lack of bandwidth, because of lack of connectivity.Because we don't have connectivity, then you can't get people on the Internet, then you can't get business on the Internet.”
“We have a lot of big business that are coming and that will probably want to be on something like dot-africa. But the way I see it, I come from Niger, and Niger is a place where we have only about 35 percent literate people in French.But, you say Hausa, you say Arabic, in Tamasheq and other languages, yes. If people can get content there, then they will go for it. And they will go for something that is under dot-ne because that's where they will do their regular, everyday stuff,” she added .