The creation of a dot-Africa generic top level domain (gTLD) will offer significant benefits to businesses and organizations located in the continent, it has been claimed.
Speaking at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ Senegal meeting, Sophia Bekele, executive director of the non-profit group DotConnectAfrica, claimed that a new top level domain could help foster economic growth.
She said a .africa gTLD would send a clear signal to businesses, customers, and everyday internet users, reports VOAnews.co.uk.
“It’s easy for them to identify, versus now dot-com. Nobody knows where that is,” Ms. Bekele noted.
“They have to read through the website to understand that it’s based in Africa and the product could probably be from somewhere else and so forth. So, it’s a great advantage of categorization and grouping and competition.”
Businesses and organizations will have the opportunity to register new top level domain names between January 12 and April 12 2012.