NITDA Seeks to Sell .ng

Nigeria appears to have finally ended its domain name crisis five months after government waded into a protracted war among the local Internet communities over control of the Top Level Domain name country code (TLD cc).

The .ng country code, formally having Dr Iyabo Odusote as administrative point of contact has been formally handed over to the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) by the ICAAN. NITDA effectively took charge nearly 10 days ago following a formal pronouncement by the global domain name registrar ICAAN to that effect.

Now, the agency entrusted with charting the IT route of the continent’s most populous country has began work to popularise the .ng domain name. “We want to get many organisations, public and private using .ng, Director General of NITDA Prof. Ajayi told NITDA.

Bogged down by crisis among members of the Interment community, the .ng just ‘did not sell.’ Not more than one thousand sites got hosted with the name in sharp contrast with .gh, the more popular TLD cc of neighboring Ghana.

There are plans to get all government institutions including publicly funded educational centres switched over to .ng soon while hosting companies are to be encouraged to tap into “our national resource,” said Ajayi in Abuja.

What has come to be referred to as the ‘.ng calamity’ was long battle between the Nigerian Internet Group (NIG) and Dr Odusote over who should locally administer the TLD cc. The ICAAN recognition of Odusote as an administrative point of contact (poc) for the .ng was only an interim one as by tradition.

The global body prefers to have an organised body that constitutes the local Internet community as the poc. Odusote never accepted the NIG as sufficiently representative of the Nigerian Internet community and for nearly a decade, there was a lingering crisis over control of the .ng TLD cc.

The crisis brewed over last December when the Nigeria Computer Society (NCS), one of the country’s largest professional bodies offered to take over from Odusote. An irked NIG accused the NCS of being used by Odusote to delay an earlier agreement reached between Odusote and the NIG that the former would hand over to it (NIG).

But an intervening Nigerian government last January finally ruled that NITDA would have the .ng for keep and decide how it should be managed. Under the plans, NITDA would form a new body to administer the TLD cc on its (NITDA) behalf.

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