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| Sunday Faloyan, VP, NIRA, CEO Skannet Ltd |
Speaking on ‘Domain Naming Conventions’ at the recently held
Switchto.ng workshop in Lagos, he said
NiRA has stipulated compliance to adhere to by any registrant and registrars.
Folayan, who doubles as chief executive officer, Skannet
Engineering Services Limited, described a domain name as being made up of
several levels of domains with levels being separated by . (dot).
He cited for instance, ‘we.keep.you.sleepi.ng ‘ saying it is
a domain name, hence, levels are read in reverse order, that is from right to
left.
“.ng is the top level
domain alias Top Level Domain (TLD), dot ‘sleepi’ is the second level domain
alias Second Level Domain (SLD), dot ‘You’ is the third level domain (3LD);
‘Keep’ is the fourth level domain (4LD) and ‘We’ is the fifth level domain
(5LD),” he explained.
Current NiRA Domain Name Policy, he noted, is on Version 1.0
and has been operated since May 5, 2008.
This, he said, outlines NiRA’s rules for the registration
and use of domain names within the .ng domain and its sub-domains, even as NiRA
domain name policy and other policies are available at the organization site.
According to him, NIRA reserves the right to disallow names
in certain domains, therefore maintains the list of domains that must not be
available for registration, otherwise such domain names could be withdrawn if
already registered.
He cited an instance with ‘Offensive Names’ which he
described as words determined by NiRA to be offensive to the Nigerian
community; ‘Restricted Names’ Names that would give the wrong impression if
used, such as Military and Government to name a few. As well as ‘Premium
Names’, which he said are domains with generic words only, thus commanding
premium value in terms of Naira and Kobo. Some of these premium domains he
listed to include ‘cooki.ng and bi.ng’ among others.
Folayan said that the Nigerian second level domains (SLDs)
comprised of .com.ng for commercial purposes and is open for registration;
.edu.ng is for degree awarding institutions; .sch.ng is for non-degree awarding schools; .gov.ng is for
governmental organizations; .mil.ng means it’s for Military and related
purposes; .org.ng - Non-Gov Organizations and open; .net.ng – networks;
.mobi.ng - mobiles and .name.ng for personal names and still open respective,
while .premium.ng is by auction only.
NiRA, Folayan said does not allow certain characters and as
such, does not currently operate Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), which
allows domain names in the natural languages of the users.
Just as he list some
characters allowed by NIRA to consist of the 26 Unaccented Roman Characters;
that is, from ‘A to Z’ both in small and capital letters respectively, in
addition to the 10 Western digits from 0 to 9, coupled with (-) hyphen.
Character combinations, he said, must conform with domain
names rules which states that it must be a maximum of 64 characters for now;
not case sensitive like ‘AGe and AgE’ saying they are the same; while the first
or last character of a domain name may not be a hyphen, there cannot be two
hyphens in a name, even as domains cannot start with xn followed by --.
He underscored the fact that second level domains (2LD)
domains could only be offered for sale via auction, whereas, some third level
domains (3LD) domains could only be offered for sale via auction with an
instance of ‘internet.com.ng’ so also that 3LD domains may not be a single
character.
The NiRA vice president added that generic restrictions may
apply for each SLD or 3LD they may also have restrictions related to these
sub-domains; for example, the .edu.ng may have restrictions which are different
from those for .gov.ng.
Domain names, Folayan advised, are more useful when they
confirm to best practices, short and popular names are better than long and
detailed names, maintaining that to register any 3LD domain within .gov.ng,
State Government entities must register the full state name or the official
abbreviation of the state name similar to that used in vehicle license plate
registration.
“States are encouraged to make 4LD available to local
governments and state government departments and agencies,” he suggested,
adding that generic names are not allowed, citing an instance with instead of
shipping.gov.ng it should be nsc.gov.ng. Just like the generic SLDs are not
allowed on 3LDs, for instance, “you cannot register com.org.ng, org.com.ng, mil.com.ng.”
Remmy Nweke
ITREALMS Online ... delivering news for ICT4D
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