On Monday 4 April, a California court cancelled a hearing to determine whether the .africa domain could be released to a South African domain-name registry by the nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). According to ICANN, which issues and manages generic top-level domains on behalf of the global Internet community, the court will issue a ruling at an unspecified future date. The delay prolongs a four-year debate over which of two registries should control the continent’s prized domain. Registries resell domain name rights to registrars such as GoDaddy, which, in turn, sign up Web addresses from customers under that domain.
ZA Central Registry technically won the rights to .africa back in 2013 via ICANN’s official process for delegating geographic domain names. ICANN’s decision was challenged in court by a rival registry called DotConnectAfrica.
The legal battle to determine .africa’s true owner could take months or years to resolve. Though DotConnectAfrica has requested an injunction asking the court to prevent the immediate transfer of .africa to ZA Central Registry, the cancellation of Monday’s hearing is no guarantee that it won’t still grant ZA Central Registry a green light to launch .africa in the meantime.
Neil Dundas, executive director of the organization that backs ZA Central Registry told IEEE Spectrum in March that if the injunction were dismissed, ICANN could probably issue the .africa domain to ZA Central Registry within two weeks. Then, ZA Central Registry would be required to host a live .africa site for a month-long trial period. The public sale of .africa sites would begin soon after.
The popularity of so-called “not com” domains has exploded in recent years as website owners find the most commonly used extensions (.com and .org) have become too crowded, and the shortest and easiest-to-remember addresses were already taken.
In response, ICANN invited registries to apply to create new domain names for the Internet. Since 2012, the organization has released more than 900 new domain names for public use, including .yoga, .bar, and .viking.
