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

Same as .com

[barbariccow]

Equivalent to .com? What, we can't say TLD here? Slashdot: catering to the LCD :(

what nonsense

[iggymanz]

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

Re:what nonsense

[Baron_Yam]

TLDs haven't been used properly anyway. It's a waste.

But that's what you get when you have the legacy of an American-built, American-centric system, designed with imperfect foresight, and there's too much invested to wipe and reload.

Re:what nonsense

[Baron_Yam]

The USA gave us a dual usage-based / geo-politically based domain system.

It really ought to be have been solely geo-politically based with a byte or two's worth of flags to indicate content type, and domains restricted to appropriate use.

[domain].[state/province].[nation].[super-national grouping]. With tiered DNS that assumes most of that for you if you leave it out. And you know what? Something to distinguish the domain from the other parts so you could have arbitrary numbers of sub-domain categorizations and not have to rely on how many parts are in the name to know what each part represents.

Just because the Internet is great and useful for the world doesn't mean it's perfect or that we should blindly accept it as it is. Just because the USA built it and most of the traffic passes through their borders doesn't mean you can't find fault with aspects of it that stem from that truth.

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"?

Re:Too long, didn't type

[rvw14]

Time to register imisstherainsdownin.africa

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.

Re:Enough already with the TLDs

[thegarbz]

It makes no more or less sense than the .eu TLD.

It makes a shitload more sense than every other TLD that has come out in the past 3 years.

Re:Too long, didn't type

[Tempest_2084]

That would be I *bless* the rains down in Africa.

Poor DNS configuration

[Motherfucking Shit]

# 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.

Re:Too long, didn't type

[s.petry]

Carry on my wayward son...

The Summary is Blatently Wrong

[rahvin112]

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.

Re:The Summary is Blatently Wrong

[nyet]

I don't know where /. gets their editors, but they're definitely getting dumber and dumber as the years go by.

Re:a TLD to block

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Here are just a few of the ones I block (plus a few that aren't listed):

.tattoo .sucks .shoes .porn .pink .ooo .love .fashion .diet .deals .chat .band .money .sexy .sex .wedding .adult .marketing .hiphop .loan .lol .party .cool .church .christmas .buzz .blackfriday .black .beer
moncler .racing .date .wang .click .review .link .faith .ninja .rocks

Re:Why a continent?

[OrangeTide]

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

You are blatantly wrong

[WML MUNSON]

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).