The ZA Central Registry has applied to administer four new gTLD’s, one for each of South Africa’s three biggest cities and for .Africa.
According to a story in on techcentral.co.za, the ZA Central Registry (also known as UniForum) will administer the .Africa domain on behalf of the African community as a whole. Its bid to run the .africa domain system is backed by the .za Domain Name Authority and the Department of Communications. It also has the support of the African Union (AU) and 40 African countries.
There are other announced applicants for .Africa and it will be interesting to see how that one gets resolved.
ICANN requires that geographic names require 60% of the states within the region support the bid.
If ZA wins the big for .africa, they say domains will cost $18 a year to register.
City domain pricing has yet to be decided.
short, I have a whole list of African countries that are .COM and they dont sell well. These wont sell much at all. Every new one will do fewer registrations than .CO, the more new ones they do the fewer registrations for each one, however the best COMs will keep increasing in value in a flight to quality and rarity.
“support of the African Union (AU)”
It is ironic that .UNION is not the gTLD being launched.
ICANN would have been better off giving people a clue what “generic” means.
Do people really think huge obscure names will be carried in the DNS ?
Breaking: ALL 256 of the Single Letter Top Level Domains are in good hands in .LA 🙂
I can’t imagine them being able to handle this from a technical perspective as the current setup behind .co.za is a disaster.
I agree with Mike Mann, the more new extensions, the fewer registrations per extension. All this will make already established g/ccTLDs like .com and .de even more valuable.
.africa TLD has a bright future
Mike
A Registry is a completely different business model than a registrant model
“A Registry is a completely different business model ”
Is that why ICANN & ISOC work so hard to keep domainers out of the Registry business ?