[governance] Re: ICANN Accredits First Registrar in Senegal

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 12:27:34PM +0200,
 Nyangkwe Agien Aaron <nyangkweagien at gmail.com> wrote 
 a message of 58 lines which said:

> You being too technical in your pronouncements.

Rereading the whole thread, there was only *one* technical issue, in a
post-scriptum. This issue is now obsolete (they fixed the name
servers).

> I want to write an article for the local audience on this
> achievement by our friend in Senegal.

He may not be in Senegal. The whois output for kheweul.com shows an
address "1501 4th Avenue, Los Angeles, CA", a city far away from
Senegal... Do not take everything written by ICANN at face value.

> What does the whole process entails, who is gaining what for which
> outcome?.  On a deeper note whic is the other African country to
> have that process and why according to you is Africa trailing
> behind?

The important things to keep in mind, IMHO:

* the whole thing is a non-event, mostly ICANN's public relations

* some african ccTLD have a registry/registrar system so kheweul.com
is NOT the second registrar in Africa, there are many others. It is
the second *ICANN* registrar (for gTLD) which is quite different. You
can get, as examples, the list of Ivory Coast registrars at
http://www.nic.ci/ and the list of Kenya registrars at
http://www.kenic.or.ke/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=22&Itemid=48.

* links of kheweul.com with Africa seems to be quite weak. On their
home page (http://www.kheweul.com/), you can see they sell ".com",
".org", ".fr", ".be", even ".cn" but not one african TLD, not even
".sn". Besides, none of their nameservers is in Africa.

* the interesting discussion is wether african providers should
promote US-based gTLD or local ccTLD. This is a complex issue: with
the US-based gTLD, a part of the money flows from Africa to the USA,
which is not a good idea. On the other hand, some african ccTLD are
badly managed, very policy-heavy (lots of bureaucracy to register a
domain), very expensive and sometimes very poor technically. (Others
are quite good like ".ke" already mentioned.)

Currently, it is a chicken-and-egg problem: many africans do not use
the african ccTLD because of the reasons above. So, there is little
incentive to improve them and so users do not use them and so on.





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