Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA), the body mandated by the federal government to operate the country’s top level domain name, .ng, may be losing over N10.5billion annually to various foreign domain operators such as .com, .net and .org.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek investigations revealed that there are about 700,000 Nigerian businesses registered with such foreign domain names which pay some $7 each annually to the domain operators for renewal.
This is clearly another form of capital flight because if all the 700,000 businesses renew their domain names with foreign operators, some $4.9 million would have left the country.
On the side, if all the businesses renew their domains locally, NiRA would be generating some N10.5 billion annually at just N15, 000 per business.
Mary Uduma, president, Nigerian Internet Registration Association, said that registering local websites on .ng provide enough security for the websites against hacking and phishing more than the one registered on foreign websites.
It would be recalled that NiRA had made several efforts aimed at encouraging Nigerians corporate to transfer their website registration to the country’s top level domain name which did not yield desired result, with some of them blaming it on cost changing their documents to reflect the new registration.
Opeoluwa Odusan, managing director, Africa.com said that yahoo was able to attract huge number of Nigerians to its email portal because the company offered the service free.
He urged the federal government to replicate similar incentive to encourage Nigerian businesses to register with .ng which is the country’s top level domain name.
Odusan noted that registering with .ng for corporate organizations based in the country is a way of patronizing Nigeria brand as it is in other countries of the world. More so, registering corporate websites with .ng he said, in a long run keeps the website secured from hackers and phishing.