East Africans to seek regional TLD
The East African Community has reportedly started planning to apply to ICANN for its own top-level domain, .eac.
I must confess, I’d never heard of the EAC before. I’ve discovered it’s an intergovernmental organization comprising five African nations – Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda – that’s been around in its current incarnation for about 10 years.
It’s one of those rare organizations granted a .int domain, currently living at eac.int.
According to AfricaNews.com, internet experts from the five countries have met to discuss applying for .eac. Geoffrey Kayonga, director of the Sanvei Institute of Technology in Kigali, Rwanda, is quoted:
We are trying to see how best we can most probably create a taskforce that is going to ensure that we obtain the regional code called ‘.eac’
There’s already a movement to create a .africa TLD for the whole of the continent, which was recently given the nod by tech ministers within the African Union.
I don´t know… I can think of a few hundred better ways of spending the kind of money it takes to apply and run a TLD for improving internet access in the region…
Yup. I have to wonder how many of these would-be geo TLDs will actually apply, once they do the maths.
Hello Kevin,
Most likely that maths will already have been done, as each of the EAC Partner States has in place its own ccTLD and therefore will surely know what it cost to establish and maintain.
I rather suspect that the proposed Regional TLD is intended to provide a means for closer collaboration and possible resource-sharing among the five ccTLD entities. This would then translate neatly into cost-reductions for each of the five … not so?