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Public can grab SA city domain names

The broader public can snap up a .joburg, .capetown and .durban internet domain name on a first come, first serve basis as of today.

This is after South Africa’s ZA Central Registry (ZACR) gave priority to trademark holders and brand owners from July this year to register their city specific names.

International brands such as global e-commerce giant Amazon and car-maker BMW have registered the likes of ‘amazon.durban’ and ‘bmw.durban’ during the last four months’ priority registration periods, referred to as ‘sunrise’ and ‘landrush’ launches.

ZACR chief operating officer (COO) Neil Dundas told Fin24 that approximately 150 of these applications have been filed for each of the three South African cities to date.

And today the general public can register their own city domain name, just like they can for .co.za, from internet companies such as Afrihost, as long as these companies are resellers for Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) accredited registrars.

Costs for an SA city domain are expected to range between an annual registration fee of R200-R300, Dundas told Fin24. General availability of the price to the registrar is R171, excluding VAT.

"On November 4 we start general availability; that's when we issue names first come, first serve," Dundas told Fin24.

"So, there's no longer an application process," he said.

Renewed internet name opportunities

Arthur Goldstuck, managing director for technology research firm World Wide Worx, told Fin24 that the launch of the city domain names is an opportunity for those who lost out on getting a .co.za name.

The ZACR also says it is approaching almost one million .co.za registrations

“This is a great opportunity for those kinds of companies to reclaim some of their branding,” Goldstuck said.

“It really opens up a new avenue and a new option for an environment that is really quite mature.

“There’s very few businesses that don’t have a website,” he said.

‘Not revolutionary for SA’s internet space’

However, Goldstuck said the general availability of South Africa’s city internet domain names is unlikely to change the country’s internet economy.

“It’s not a revolution; it’s really an option,” Goldstuck said.

South African internet veteran Andy Higgins - who is the founder and former managing director of Bidorbuy.co.za and now CEO of e-commerce company uAfrica - told Fin24 he thinks the city domain names are a positive development.

But he thinks “.co.za will remain the defacto domain for a South African business to have”.

“I don't think it is massively game changing for the industry,” Higgins told Fin24.

“I think it will be mostly beneficial for hyper localised businesses such as for a Cape Town restaurant or plumber etc. and less valuable for a more national or international business,” he said.

Challenges facing new domain names

City internet domain names fall into ICANN’s ‘generic Top Level Domains’ (gTLDs) such as .com.

This means that only accredited ICANN registrars can register .capetown, .joburg and .durban for buyers. And there’s only three ICANN accredited registrars in South Africa, according to Dundas of ZACR.

But internet domain name sellers in South Africa not accredited by ICANN are then likely to become resellers for these ICANN accredited registrars.

The ZACR; though, plans setting up its own gTLD registrar to act as a proxy for resellers in South Africa.

"Our plan is to create our own vertical registrar so that we can then directly again then provision," Dundas told Fin24.

"So we are creating what we call a proxy registrar solution,” said Dundas.

The other challenge is ‘universal acceptance’ whereby websites need to adjust, for example, online forms to accept the likes of .durban in an email address field.

Dundas told Fin24 that the latest versions of web browsers have also had to adjust to recognise the latest gTLDs.

* Follow @GarethvanZyl  on Twitter. For more tech news, follow Fin24tech @Fin24_Tech.

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