Domain Name News, Domain Industry News, ICANN News, Registry News

The East African Community secretariat based in Arusha intends to patent domain names that have relations to both the region and the community in the World Wide Web, EAC secretary general Ambassador Juma Volter Mwapachu stated.

Addressing journalists during the launch the East African Community web portal, both Mr. Mwapachu and his Deputy Secretary General in charge of Planning and Infrastructure, Alloyce Mutabingwa expressed the need for the regional body secretariat to start patenting and actually establishing customized domain addresses bearing suffixes like .EA and .EAC.
These according to the Secretary General could be used to promote regional identity over the internet instead of the widely applied commercially domain .com.
Already member states are making use of their own local identity domain names like .co.tz in Tanzania and .co.ke for Kenya and so forth.
The world's leading web search engine and internet applications producer 'Google' for instance has already established customized local pages for Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi with those of Kenya and Tanzania being displayed in the Kiswahili language and using domain addresses like www.google.co.tz and www.google.co.ke.

Read the entire article here : http://allafrica.com/stories/200907201146.html