Many of the costs of changing to Nigeria’s top level domain name .ng have all conspired to hobble the efforts of the Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA) and her registrars to attract corporate organizations to the country’s identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy on the Internet.
The .ng country code top-level domains (ccTLD) is an Internet top-level domain reserved for Nigeria and provide easily recognizable and memorizable names to numerically addressed Internet resources.
But Opeoluwa Odusan, managing director, Africa.com and immediate past chief operating officer, NiRA, said that hidden costs such as cost of changing company’s letterhead paper, complementary cards, branded documents among others are responsible for the reluctance of corporates organisations such as banks to switch to the .ng.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered some of the corporates organisations are worried over the impact of the costs in their short-term calculations of profit and productivity.
“When I was in NiRA as chief operating officer, I met with some banks on this issue they were complaining of huge cost outlay involved in changing those items to reflect their new website which is in several millions of naira as a major factor. If you look at the few banks that have changed to .ng, when you log in on .ng it will redirect you to their .com website which does not make sense,” Odusan added.
NIRA had a few years ago initiated a campaign aimed at attracting some 100 big organizations in the country that are visible in the media to register their websites with .ng in order to make the domain popular.
Among these organizations are all the banks operating in the country and major telecommunications operators.
This initiative did not yield the desired result as greater percentage of the targeted organizations did not change to .ng.
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.
According to him, registering corporate websites on .ng will help keep the website secure from hackers and phishing.
He also frowned at some policies of NiRA including the idea of keeping some 30,000 names at premium which attract N50, 000 to register and the sharing formula between NiRA and its registrars
He said the prevailing sharing formula does not motivate registrars to push for more registration as they get little of what accrues from that effort.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that for .ng registration of N15, 000; NiRA takes N12,000 while the registrar get N3,000.
But, registration of .com.ng which cost N1,500, NiRA takes N1,000 leaving N500 for the registrar.
Mrs. Mary Uduma, President of Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NIRA), has said that more than 250, 000 dot ng (.ng) domain names would have been registered by the end of 2014.
She said that the association, as at Dec. 2013, through its registrars, had registered more than 50, 000 domain names.
“We are expecting that we will reach 250, 000 domain names by the end of the year. We have already drawn up programmes on how to create awareness on the .ng domain names,” Uduma said.
She said that one of the strategies put in place to achieve the 250, 000 target was the ”Domain Name Fiesta”, which will hold later this month.
According to her, the fiesta will entail going round the states and local government areas to ensure that Nigerians know about the .ng domain name.
She said that another strategy to be taken by NIRA was its collaboration with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC).
The NiRA president said that the collaboration would ensure that anybody registering its company’s name with the CAC, also took a domain name.