Nigeria’s top level domain makes lazy progress

The President, Executive Board of Directors, Nigeria Internet Registration Association Reverend Sunday Folayan have poses with Nigerian domain name .ng

.NG, Nigeria’s Country Code Top Level Domain Name, ccTLD, which is the country’s identity on the super-high is making little progress, 13 years after Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA) took over its management, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek has learnt.

A report on the number of registrations on dot ng on yearly basis shows that the country’s domain name is far from being the toast of Nigerians and their businesses.

According to the report NiRA recorded just 27,295 additions between June 30, 2017 and June 30, 2018 going by 118,264 registrations on dot ng as at June 30, 2018 compared to 90,969 it has the same time last year.

Investigations identified some of the factors responsible for the lack of interest by Nigerian businesses to identify with their own brand to include; lack of awareness, where some businesses belief that registering on .ng tend to project their business as local while registering on foreign managed domain means international outlook.

More so, most web developers in the country are constantly advising their client against registering with .ng on the basis of unsubstantiated security reasons.

Sikiru shehu, dean of Nira Academy, said that with a population of about 200m and about 30% of the population as Internet users, it’s a strong pointer to a world of opportunities and wealth creation for Domain name entrepreneurs and the general economy.

“If however, a greater percentage of the population decided to go for non (.ng) domains it could also cause capital flight and affects the economy negatively,” he said.

Mohammed Rudman, vice president, NiRA, decrying lack of interest in dot ng and hosting of local content abroad said that Nigeria is a net “Importer” of bandwidth. This means more Downloads than Uploads.

According to him, ‘local content hosted abroad has higher latency than if hosted locally –over 1000%. It makes data access (browsing) slow with poor quality of service. Internet becomes more expensive due to the distance, hence end users pay more.

They take less capacity due to the high cost and hence cannot make good use of it. The process of making payment for data hosting becomes a hassle due to the need to pay in USD.’

Rudman however, identified some of the economic implications of hosting local content abroad to include; hindrance to business continuity: -Outage on submarine cables seriously affect businesses that rely on their online data hosted abroad.

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-Lower support level: -Dealing with an overseas hosting provider can often subject your business to lengthy time differences and restrict your support levels to that country’s business hours. Being unable to access support when you need it can put your online business at severe risk.

A survey conducted by Akamai and Gomez.com shows that half of the Internet users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded in 3 seconds.

The report noted that 79% of web shoppers who face any difficulty in a site’s shopping experience say that they won’t return to the site to buy again. And half of them will tell their friends about the unpleasant shopping experience. That’s bad press for your business.

TagMan’s 2012 study show that a second-long delay causes a 7% drop in conversions, an 11% drop in page views and a 16% drop in customer satisfaction.