By Benprince Ezeh

THE Nigeria Internet Registration Association, NiRA, has harped on the need for Nigerians to make and promote the .NG as the nation’s domain name. The idea was given impetus by Sunday A Folayan, reverend and president of Nira, while speaking to Realnews on importance and impacts of NiRA to Nigerians.

He said that local content hosting will drive economic growth, unlike hosting abroad which will strain foreign earnings and slow the growth of local data centres.

Folayan said that the .NG is the national identity of Nigeria in the cyber space. “Every domain name has a suffix which it ends; it uniquely defines what the domain name is all about. So, domains that end with .NG are unique identifier for Nigerian domain. It is not necessary that the domain name is used exclusively in Nigeria. It is just like you buy and register a car in a place and can still drive it anywhere .NG is for domains registered in Nigeria.

“This is a great advancement as domain names offer any business, individual, entity online presence to offer their goods and services simpler, easier and faster.

“When domain names are properly used in Nigeria, it will boost the economy of the country. For instance, if you want to buy anything in Nigeria, you can look up price.ng to go across all the buyers offering the good and service.”

According to Folayan, one advantage is that a Nigerian business registered on the domain will be found faster online in Nigeria than one registered in the .com registry. “As your business grows, you can then move outside Nigeria and there, you can register under the domain registrars if the countries you opened an office in, e.g., .GH in Ghana or .SL in Sierra Leone, etc.

“A good example of this is Google, it has the google.com, but also has google.com.ng domain in Nigeria which shows to show that geo-locating is very key to a business being found online.

“However, the big players in business understand the importance of tying their business to a locality which helps to ensure more visibility and patronage and the small businesses should take a queue.” He said.

Contrary to the notion that the .NG domain is expensive, Folayan said that the .NG domain is appropriately priced. He assured that the pricing is based on the long-term sustainability of the registry so that it can continue to offer its services.

“NiRA is pushing hard to solve the challenge of education of users, and that it has established the NiRA Academy which is a DNS Centre of excellence in Nigeria that trains the needed manpower in all spheres related to the business and spheres that NiRA operates such as Engineers, Technicians, Entrepreneurs, Policy makers, Internet governance, and law enforcement,” he said.

– Oct. 26, 2018 @ 14:15 GMT /