After a long and difficult journey, NiRA finally said in the first week of January 2009 that it had begun the delivery of a key component of its mandate – the automated and commercial service.

According to the body, Nigerians all over the world and others interested in the .ng open domain will be able to register .ng domains with instant results. Registration, it said, would be possible through any of the NiRA accredited registrars, which currently are 29 in number, with more to be accredited as requests come.

That NiRA finally attained this mark and realised the much dreaded feat, is not the main issue. The issue, therefore, is how many Nigerian people and businesses now realise the possible leverage they can get from the development, or otherwise.

The President, NiRA, Mr. Ndukwe Kalu, during the inauguration of an eight-man Auction Committee for the nation‘s country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) name, dot ng, said the body was now set to deliver on the key component of its mandate by going commercial.

To facilitate acceptance and increased penetration, Kalu said the Registrars would offer online payment systems, and instant domain registrations with domains visible one hour later.

Nigerians, he stated, had every reason to go for .ng domain since the domains would be one of the cheapest cctlds and second only to .com for the generic top level domains (gtlds) in pricing.

Obviously, the commercialisation of the domain is timely, owing to the fact that the project is not being funded by government 100 per cent. This automatically means that the project is self sustaining in terms of finance.

Corroborating this, the President, Nigeria Computer Society, Prof. Charles Uwadia, says, ”Government does not fund the .ng project 100 per cent. And as such, services provided by NiRA should be paid for. For Nigeria, this is self-sustaining, and should be paid for.

”It is highly subsidised. This is the case all over the world except for countries like China, Cuba, for instance, where there is 100 per cent funding by government.

He said the .ng project gave the country a national identity on the Web, and this was crucial considering the fact that it gives people and businesses in the country an image that was identifiable among other nationals.

According to him, this gives the country an opportunity to code its services internally/locally, thereby reducing traffic and other inter-connect hitches.

Considering the geographical size of the country vis-à-vis our teeming population, it is pertinent to emphasise that it is high time we started gaining some form of technological independence.

On the .com platform for instance, study had shown that every e-mail sent within Nigeria targeted at a receiver in Nigeria, goes through a transmission network across the globe – reaching Europe and America, before coming to the receiver, who is in Nigeria, as a received mail.

This does not only pose huge challenge to the security status of individuals in Nigeria, but represents a huge security lapse for businesses, companies and the country at large.

Experts say a domain name is an addressing construct, used for finding and identifying computers on the Internet. This is because computers use Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which are a series of numbers used to identify each other on the Internet.

People often miss the importance of having their own unique domain name for their web sites. A domain name represents you, your company and your online presence; as does a ”business card”. If you do not have your own domain name you will not be able to promote your own online identity and web site on the World Wide Web.

On the World Wide Web, your domain name is your own unique identity. No two parties can ever hold the same domain name simultaneously therefore, your Internet identity is totally unique. If you have a business site on the Internet, your domain name is your own online brand and in a sense, you can use your domain name as your online business card.

With your own domain name, your web site and e-mail addresses for example will have that professional look, being unique to your business. Many people often miss the importance of having and then keeping their domain name until they lose it. Once this happens, they soon realise that they have lost their whole online identity.

With the Nigeria Internet Registration Association commencing automated and commercial services at the beginning of this year, many Nigerians still do not know their strategic roles in the framework. STANLEY OPARA examines the .ng domain name initiative and associated opportunities
For over 10 years, Nigeria recorded less than 600 registrations on the .ng after it was created in 1995 due to controversies, but NiRA recently said it was targeting 1 million registrants in the nation‘s ccTLD by 2009.

NiRA, currently, has achieved over 3,000 domain names registration since coming on board in the first quarter of last year, believes that its registration exercise, which is ongoing, is expected to attract one million before the next 24 months.

Ndukwe had also said that NiRA was aware that several Nigerian domains existed but were hitherto registered mostly with the international domain names, but added that with the .ng project, Nigeria‘s ‘flag‘ could now fly on the Internet. He explained that this way, it would be easy to identify the websites, which were for Nigeria‘s.

With this, it will now be easy to track spam and fraudulent mails, which emanate from Nigeria.

A National Information Infrastructure Backbone is now more expedient than ever to carry Nigerian Internet traffic and keep local traffic local.

With all this, NiRA has said it is set to finalise its relationship with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers guidelines with the necessary changes to Internet Assigned Numbers Authority with new contacts and Nigeria specific name servers.