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Author: Kabir Abubakar
Posted to the web: 9/5/2007 9:49:48 PM

An open letter to president Yar'adua on the need to standardize the Nigerian States' official Internet domain names.   By Kabir Abubakar, President, All Africa Web Hosting .com   Sir, this is to congratulate you as you mark the 100th day in office.  Going by some of the decisions and actions you have taken since assuming office, there is a clear indication that your administration really wants to lay a solid foundation and erect appropriate structures for Nigeria's dream of becoming one of the foremost world economies latest by the year 2020.  This is a commendable dream and one that is achievable provided required willpower, sincerity, resources and right people are deplored appropriately.  And provided advantage is taken of the opportunities inherent in the Information Technology (IT) that is now the hubris of knowledge driver in the world today. This open letter is sent to you, My Excellency; to call your attention to an area that is important in the commendable step government is already taken regarding Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and one of its derivatives, the Internet. It is gratifying that Nigeria finally settled its lingering problem of domesticating its internet Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) name assigned to it.  A top-level domain (TLD) is the last part of an Internet domain name; that is, the letters which follow the final dot of any domain name. For example, in the domain name www.example.com, the top-level domain is com (or COM, as domain names are not case-sensitive).  Each country of the world is assigned with a unique ccTLD that allows it to be identified on the World Wide Web (WWW).  The ccTLD for Nigeria is .ng.   However, for some reasons best known to a Nigerian who hijacked and pirated the administration of this vital global and national resource and domiciled it in Trieste, Italy for several years, Nigerians were denied access to this vital Internet resource.  It was only the intervention of former president Obasanjo that made it possible for this vital resource to be finally rescued at a hefty cost to the Nigerian treasury and placed in its rightful place in Nigeria.  It is now being administered by the Nigerian Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA).   For all the years while the battle to rescue Nigeria's ccTLD and domicile it in Nigeria was going on, every Internet user in Nigeria interested in acquiring an Internet domain name had to apply abroad to use other non-Nigerian domiciled domain names and addresses. Therefore all individuals, governments and governmental organizations and private corporate organizations settled for the 'dot.com' and the other variants.  That is why government official internet websites, more often than not, bear website names and addresses such as for example, Sokoto State's reads: www.Sokoto-State.com, Kano State's reads: www.KanoState.net, Zamfara State's reads: www.ZamfaraOnline.com  instead of  the appropriate name and address say for example, www.kebbiState.gov.ng.  This goes to show that the pirating of Nigeria's ccTLD did incalculable and very expensive damage to Nigeria's image in the global Internet user community.  It will take huge sums of money for those already affected by this embarrassing action to remedy their individual situations.   In addition, the pirating of the ccTLD created a chaotic situation whereby there are inconsistency and lack of uniformity in Nigeria's domain names addressing system.  For example, compare the Nigerian example cited above with say, a similar situation in the USA where the 50 States have the following  pattern of addressing structure: For Texas (TX) it is www.state.tx.us, for California (CA) it is www.state.ca.us, for Maryland (MD) it is www.state.md.us, for Delaware (DE) it is www.state.de.us, and so on.  There is no any public organization that uses the root 'dot.com' because it is purely reserved for private commercial and business entities, unlike in Nigeria where public entities use all manners of domain names without following the international standardized system of domain names and addressing.  This shows that even though Nigeria has succeeded in domesticating its Internet Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) - '###.ng', hosted and administered by the NITDA, however, only very few State governments, individuals and organizations are aware of this development.   Permit me, Sir, to continue in an anecdotal manner.You are trying to find information for a research project to do with all the 36 States (and Abuja FCT) in Nigeria.  You decided to go on the Internet to the various States' official websites for the relevant information.  You were assured that all the 36 States (and Abuja FCT) have official websites up and running.  Where and how will you start looking?  A good guess is that you will Google your way to get the list of Nigerian States.  However, good luck on finding the official websites' domains you are looking for.  Because there is no system, consistency or pattern to these domain names, you may end up being frustrated in your search and start looking for alternative ways of finding the information.  That was exactly what happened to this writer. Your next step may be to Google the individual States in the hope that your effort there would yield some results leading you to the domains you are interested in.  That was how this writer made the discovery of the inconsistencies he observed and stated in this open letter to My Excellency. As earlier cited above, Kebbi State's official domain name reads www.kebbiState.gov.ng, Sokoto State's reads www.Sokoto-State.com, Kano State's reads www.KanoState.net, Zamfara State's reads www.ZamfaraOnline.com, and the inconsistency goes on.  Given Nigerian's stature in Africa and the World, use of commercial Internet TLD acronym (without ccTLD) for naming and addressing government Internet websites is fundamentally serious and unacceptable.  For Nigeria to join the pack of global ICT 'haves', we need to adopt the appropriate standardized nomenclature of the TLD for each segment of the World Wide Web architecture. Nigeria has also established the National eGovernment Strategy (NeGSt) and other ICT initiatives.  It is the opinion of this writer that it is high time we started seeing some serious action on the ground vis-à-vis standardization of systems, including electronic channels for direct service delivery.   In the case of standardizing the States' domains, this is something that pro-active governments all over the world have undertaken.  As earlier cited above, in the United States, for example, once you know the domain name of any of the 50 States, you just follow the same pattern for the rest of the 49 States.   But probably because of lack of awareness and information that is why only a very few States even bothered to use the appropriate and standard '###.gov.ng as a ccTLD, and instead, most of the 36 States still use the '###.com' TLD, only.  NITDA and the government should mount aggressive public enlightenment and awareness campaigns on this matter.   Furthermore, my company, www.KebbiWebHosting.com (an affiliate of www.KebbiState.com and www.AllAfricaWebHosting.com) started buying off all those existing registered Nigerian States domain names bearing commercial acronym dot.com.  First, all the Nigerian states with a .com TLD as their domain names were traced.  Then, their original owners who registered them were identified.  My company started buying them back.  This is to ensure that the various State governments obtain their appropriate standard domain name address assigned to them by the NITDA upon application.   However, after buying a couple of the Nigerian States domains with the  '###.com TLD,' including Kebbi State, Kano State, Kaduna State, Ogun State, Anambra State, Edo State, to name a few, from their current owners, my company faced a brick wall;  the shylock owners were hell bent on charging astronomical sums of money in order to surrender them. To prove their point, they made reference to a Domain selling site, www.GreatDomains.com. For this reason, the initiative has been suspended at the moment but my company has come up with another alternative.  For example, it has registered all the Nigerian 36 States and FCT under the e- prefix category of the domain names - that is, with an 'e' preceding the names of each State and Abuja, FCT.   Even if you never heard of eGovernment, eCommerce, eBusiness, eBooks, eTicket, eTrade, eLibrary, eLearning, eWeek, eHarmony, eFlowers, eCards, eJournals, eEmpowerment, and eLoan, you must have heard of eBay and eMail.  The last on this list, eMail, refers to electronic mail (a digital concept of mail) instead of the old (ancient, if you like) snail mail that we used to write, put stamps on them, and the mailman will deliver them to the recipients at snail's speed.  It is with this kind of analogy in mind that this writer registered all the Nigerian 36 States with an 'e' preceding the names.   In essence, the Nigerian eStates concept has been created by my firm.  For example, Lagos State has been registered as eLagosState.com, Oyo State as eOyoState.com, Benue State as eBenueState.com, and Abuja FCT registered as eAbujaFCT.com etc.   Why .com?  Even though the '###.com' started as a 'commercial' TLD, it is now generic and ubiquitous.  There is now a new 'commercial' TLD that goes by '### .Biz.'  This writer believes that most of the people think of the .com first before any other TLD.    A good question to be asked at this junction is that, even if this idea is adopted and both the Nigerian ccTLD and eStates concept become official, what do we then do with the various existing States-owned websites vis-à-vis the Nigerian ccTLD and eState names?   The simple answer is - we do nothing, yes nothing.  No changes or modifications are needed to the current (existing) States' sites.  All that would be needed is assigning all the States their Nigerian ccTLD and then directing (forwarding) both the ccTLD and the eState names so that they go to the existing sites.  Those existing sites will not be altered in anyway, shape, or form.  And the original names on the display will remain the same, if that becomes the preference.  The ccTLD and the eState names will not appear on the sites, they will just be used for navigational purposes.  This way, all the Nigerian States official domains will have a consistency and a pattern, making it easier for anyone to find any State's website once he/she knows just one of them.  And this will hold true whether one uses the ccTLD or the (eStates) dot.com TLD to find the various States' sites.  This idea will kill two birds with one stone.  On the one hand, the use of the country's TLD for governmental organizations will satisfy the right segment of the WWW architecture, while on the other hand, the use of the ubiquitous dot.com (in addition to the ccTLD) with satisfy people who are very used to the dot.com TLD.   The truth is that communications technology is developing so quickly no one foresees all the opportunities and challenges it raises. Nigerians need all the help they can get from the government to join the global Internet community and information superhighway.   It is the hope and believes of this writer that both the President and the Hon Minister of Information and Communications would give this seemingly trivial issue the consideration it deserves.  Thank you.   CC: (1) Hon Minister of Information and Communications     (2) Chief Economic Adviser, to the president