Indications have emerged that .africa domains will become available from September 2014. According to Neil Dundas, ZA Central Registry (ZACR) Chief Operating Officer, the Sunrise and Rush periods will begin in May 2014and end before September.
He said: “dotAfrica (.africa) domains will be available for registration on a first-come-first-served basis from September 2014 once the rights of trademark holders have been processed during the designated Sunrise period.”
According to Dundas, ZACR has received a formal invitation from ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers) to commence contracting in its capacity as the selected dotAfrica registry operator who has successfully completed initial evaluation.
“There are two items that have delayed the conclusion of contracting, namely the provision of a Continuing Operating Instrument (COI) according to ICANN’s revised criteria and the fact that our company name has changed from UniForum SA to the ZA Central Registry,” said Lucky Masilela ZACR’s new CEO.
“All things being equal we anticipate that we will be able to commence our Sunrise process in either April or May this year,” said Mr Dundas.
Upon receiving the final go-ahead from ICANN, the ZACR will commence the dotAfrica launch process by running both Sunrise and Land Rush applications in parallel for a period of 90-days.
The priority ranking system will allocate domain name applications, submitted during the 90-day application window, in order of highest priority to lowest priority. Domain name applications based on trademarks registered in Africa will receive the highest priority, followed by trademarks registered in other jurisdictions. Applications that are not based on any validated priority right, such as generic Land Rush applications, will receive the lowest priority.
