Council tasks NiRA on price slash, body registers 1,542 .ng domain names

NIGERIA’s Broadband Council has called on the country’s Internet Registration Association (NiRA) to reduce the cost of acquiring .ng in order for it to be globally competitive.

    The .ng is Nigeria’s domain name. Domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are formed by the rules and procedures of the Domain Name System (DNS). Any name registered in the DNS is a domain name.

    Domain names are used in various networking contexts and application-specific naming and addressing purposes. In general, a domain name represents an Internet Protocol (IP) resource, such as a personal computer used to access the Internet, a server computer hosting a web site, or the web site itself or any other service communicated via the Internet.

    The Broadband Council, which is chaired by the Minister of Communications Technology, Dr. Omobola Johnson, at a meeting in Abuja recently to review the country’s match towards broadband revolution, proposed that to accelerate the uptake of .ng domains, the National Information and Technology Development Agency (NITDA) would close the funding gap in NiRA if pent up demand did not result in the anticipated high levels of uptake.   

     Meanwhile, in Lagos at the weekend, the President of the NIRA, Mrs. Mary Uduma, has said that 1,542 .ng domain names were registered in the month of January.

   Uduma made this known in a statement made available to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos on Saturday.

   She noted that there was a slight increase in domain name activities in January 2015 compared to 1,425 registered in January 2014.

   Uduma said that 1,070 domain names were renewed in January 2015 with an increase of 259 renewals when compared to 811 in January 2014. 

She said that the association transferred 41 domain names, showing a decrease of eight, compared to 49 transferred in January 2014.

   ‘’With more appreciation of the Nigerian Identity on the Internet, as the year progresses, more activities will be noted within the domain name industry,’’ the NIRA president said. 

   She said that .ng (like Nigeria’s currency – Naira – and +234 for country code) was the official Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) for Nigeria.

   According to her, availability of names is better on the .ng ccTLD than on the generic top-level domain (gTLD) like .com, .org.

   She said that, with the .ng domain name, branding and geo-targeting of local content to the Nigerian market would be easier.

   ‘’With the .ng, our primary DNS servers are secure and locally managed with multiple cast servers located around the world,’’ Uduma said.

   She said that hosting businesses on the .ng would help to support the Nigerian economy and provide jobs for local information technology professionals.