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South Africa Wants Control of .za
fdiaz5583 writes "Recently, the South African government wants to seize control of the .za domain. However, ICANN owns the domains and under the ICANN rules, they will not relinquish control. Mike Lawrie who is global administrator of domain names states: 'If it becomes illegal for me to do the job under South African law and if I am not authorized by ICANN to hand over the administration, the .za domain will have to shut down until the issue is cleared up'." We mentioned this tussle earlier. The .za administrator doesn't like the way the government is going about this; the government, of course, has men with guns, so it's not like he's going to win in the end, it's only a question of how ugly it will get.
Because it's an Afrikaans acronym; zuid afrika.
ZA is the ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 designation for South Africa.
It is from the Dutch, Zuid Afrika
SA is Saudi Arabia
To dispell a few myths(at the risk of being called redundant but it seems necessary given the level of knowledge here about places not big in the news): South Africa has a white minority of some 6 million people in a country of about 42 million, the rest being mostly black of various tribes, with about 3 million of mixed race and about 1 million asians. It's pretty varied culturally and worth a visit. It was ruled by the white minority for most of it'S political history and started changing after 1989 with the ending of racialy biased laws. It had it's first truly democratic elections in 1994 which the current government, the ANC won.
.za domain seems to be one of those things. Basically it seems as if they are trying to make the admin of the TLD *and* registrations more available to the majority of the population which is very poor and has no internet access. While I applaud this, I think they're going about it in the wrong manner and at the wrong place. Having control of the TLD isn't going to give anybody DSL or even Dial-Up overnight and even if they had the access, they still wouldn't have the computers. My guess is that this is going to end up in a bureaucratic, corrupt mess that some other government will have to sort out in the future. But you never know.
It has had a lot of ups and downs and has a horrific crime rate and a lot of problems, but, in general, it has done a lot better than many whites predicted(myself included). It has won a major legal struggle against international drug companies in it's efforts to legally produce cheap , generic anti-AIDS drugs.
One of it's unsolved problems is that the government is new in historical terms and tends to do things in ridiculously bureaucratic ways. This messing with the