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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.
> (blah).africa
Too long, didn't type. Why didn't they just steal ".af" (Afghanistan today, but common abbreviation for Africa)?
An easy way to filter out those Nigerian Prince scam emails!
#DeleteFacebook
Ouch, just wait till the racists find out. There's going to be some very bad websites out there...
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Equivalent to .com? What, we can't say TLD here? Slashdot: catering to the LCD :(
Good thing you simplified the concept of a TLD to help the Slashdot audience of brain damaged 6 year olds understand that it's "equivalent to the more familiar .com".
trying to imply there is any kind of unity between the North African Arab countries and the others...yeah right
Since the only thing (network wise) that comes out of Africa is spam and other crap, blocking this will be 100% perfect compression.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
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"?
Even if the AU were way more EU-like, having a TLD for a continent; rather than for entities in the AU zone or something, still wouldn't make a whole lot of sense.
.com and friends; but covers an area that is unified more or less only in the sense that it's classified as a single continent. For the purposes of travel, trade, customs, currency, etc. there isn't really such a thing as 'Africa', there are 54 nation states(not all of them exactly happy with each other at any given time); plus a dozen or so oddball dependencies and quasi-states that have some trappings of statehood but not enough clout to get full recognition. Unless you expect your customers to suck at geography and need to remind them what continent you are on for some reason, 'is in or associated with Africa' really doesn't clarify much.
If having their precious vanity domain amuses some people, it certainly won't be the dumbest idea ICANN has dabbled in; but it's hard to make a good case for a TLD that is geographic, rather than vaguely tied to a concept, like
Having done so, I can now conclude my reading of TFS with a proud sense of accomplishment, though I never finished it.
nigeria just got assigned .scam domain
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.
"If there was a gay Afro-Puertorican Linux distribution, I'd give it a try" ~lucm
There are also .eu and .asia. Additionally, the number of TLDs has become quite big and their justification unclear. How could you restrict the access to a list including .eurovision or .firestone?
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
I assume travel.africa and mobile.africa became parked domains within an hour of this article coming out.
# host 0abaa55f4b4b5f8a9a55d1fe33f49a.africa
0abaa55f4b4b5f8a9a55d1fe33f49a.africa has address 127.0.53.53
0abaa55f4b4b5f8a9a55d1fe33f49a.africa mail is handled by 10 your-dns-needs-immediate-attention.africa.
Great, they have some wildcard garbage going on instead of properly returning NXDOMAIN.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Please?
It's a top level domain. Which is pedantic on some level but...sigh. Whatever, this stopped being news for nerds a while ago.
I certainly would have no reason to argue that .africa isn't at least as worthy as a great many other gTLDs; and since we've already started down that dumb idea, there's no principled reason to deny the request to create it; it's just that gTLDs are mostly worthless trash with no particularly good reason to exist, so not being worse than they are isn't much of an achievement; and I would also have a difficult time arguing in favor of the utility and value of the TLD.
The list in my previous comment was also meant to somehow support your point: lots of alternatives which almost nobody uses. And what happens with the country second-level domains is even worse (a descriptive but incomplete list). I am currently running some crawling bots to rank domains and have found quite a few problems on this front; in fact, they still cannot understand all the possible scenarios (after having collected over 1M domains).
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Africa didn't get its own web address. Some company registered the Africa Top Level Domain (TLD). This company has total control over the TLD and likely has no relationship to the continent or any of the countries in it. In all likelyhood the registrant for the TLD is a European or American company hoping to make big bucks charging people to use the TLD. In 10 years 99.999999999% of the domains on this TLD will not even involve an African company or individual.
I guess it was too much trouble to list the fucking domain in the summary, eh?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Here are just a few of the ones I block (plus a few that aren't listed):
moncler
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
It's not the worst new top-level domain. Not even close to the worst. .science .stream .men .party .top .study .click .gdn .date .webcam .tips .expert .watch .wiki .fail .cool .wtf .xyz .gripe
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
He can call it www.iwasbornin.africa!
I know, I know, but it is funny.
You guys hire complete morons now, huh?
Also, grats on the clickbait tactic of not telling us what the TLD actually is in the headline.
You suck.
Africa didn't get its own web address. Some company registered the Africa Top Level Domain (TLD). This company has total control over the TLD and likely has no relationship to the continent or any of the countries in it. In all likelyhood the registrant for the TLD is a European or American company hoping to make big bucks charging people to use the TLD. In 10 years 99.999999999% of the domains on this TLD will not even involve an African company or individual.
You don't have a clue. A cursory Google search would tell you that it's operated by a South African company (ZACR), which was awarded control by ICANN following a lengthy legal dispute with a Kenyan competitor (DCA).
She is his ex-wife.
Yeah, let's separate everybody just like the great old world. This is going to make it easier to make virtual borders. Wonderful. That's all we need. /s
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti