The Nigeria Internet Registration
Association on Monday said that unless the Federal Government
intervened, the country would continue to lose about N10bn yearly
through the hosting of country’s code Top Level Domain name and .ng
outside the country.
It stated that the government’s
intervention had become necessary given that information put on the
Internet were no longer safe “since it had become easier to hack into
it.”
NiRA said such data would be better
secured if hosted within the country, adding, “Only the current
administration can make this possible.”
According to the association, domain
hosting is ‘renting a space’ on the Internet to hold a website so that
anyone can find the website by typing in the domain name.
The President, NiRa, Mr. Sunday Folayan,
said it was regrettable that just one per cent of the .ng domains
registered by its registrars was what was hosted in the country.
Our correspondent found out that only
1.33 per cent of the 19,649 domain names registered and hosted by NiRA’s
registrars is hosted in Nigeria.
Of the 56 NiRA registrars, 79 per cent
of them are Nigerians, while the remaining are mostly from the United
Kingdom, Germany and other countries.
Folayan said, “And if we estimate,
hosting has the income of about five to 10 times the cost of domain name
registration. You will see that it is a lot of money we are talking
about. So, 99 per cent of what NiRA has registered is hosted outside,
and NiRA has conservatively put what Nigeria is losing by today’s value
at not less than N10bn in terms of hosting from the .ng domain.
“There are other .com domains that are
also registered by NiRA, which could be more than five times the
registered .ng. So, we are talking of not less than N50bn, plus the
N10bn from the .ng, making a total of not less than N60bn,” he said.
The NiRA president said the hosting of
the .ng domain names outside Nigeria amounted to capital flight and was
not good for the country’s economy.
“This is capital flight; it is something that bothers NiRA and we are
looking at ways to mitigate that and help preserve foreign exchange,
particularly at this very tight time for the country,” he added.
source:punch
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