Africa Gets Its Own Web Address (bbc.com)

Africa now has the unique web address .africa, equivalent to the more familiar .com, following its official launch by the African Union. From a report on BBC: AU commission chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma hailed its creation as the moment when Africa "got [its] own digital identity." The AU says the .africa domain name will "bring the continent together as an internet community." Addresses can now reflect a company's interest in the whole of Africa. For example, a mobile phone company could create mobile.africa to show its Africa-wide presence, or a travel company could set up travel.africa.

Comments

what nonsense

[iggymanz]

trying to imply there is any kind of unity between the North African Arab countries and the others...yeah right

Who exactly are "the racists" you refer to?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who exactly are "the racists" that you're referring to?

Would you consider black Africans who host a website at a .africa domain that promotes anti-white, anti-Asian, anti-Indian, or anti-Amerindian sentiment, for example, as being among "the racists"?

Enough already with the TLDs

[TroII]

I wish them luck, but I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to be creating yet another top-level domain.

For example, a mobile phone company could create mobile.africa to show its Africa-wide presence, or a travel company could set up travel.africa.

So they'll sell off a few hundred generic words to speculators, but I predict few others will be buying in. Many of the new gTLDs created over the past couple of years are either shutting down, or jacking up domain prices into the multi-hundred dollar per year range just to stay in operation. Keeping a TLD alive isn't cheap, and it turns out there's not much demand for all of this namespace after all. When you can't amortize your TLD's infrastructure cost across millions of customers, you wind up having to price each domain so high that nobody's going to buy one.