Third time lucky: ICANN beats off .africa ban

Internet overseer ICANN will push ahead with a new ".africa" top-level domain, despite having twice been ordered not to because of serious questions over how it handled the case. Earlier this month, a Los Angeles court refused [PDF] a preliminary injunction against ICANN that would prevent it from adding .africa to the …

[Terje]

To my Ears this sounds very much like a copy of the recent .web affair covered last week.

Mines the one with a somewhat smaller brown envelope this time

[Version 1.0]

I love new TLDs

The addition of new top-level domains really helps fighting spam at the mail server - I can simply drop them. This sounds a little harsh I know but I monitor their spam load and so far I have not seen anything good come from any of them - once the spam starts arriving, the domain is added to the drop list.

[Paul Kinsler]

maybe

they should just award one party ".africa", and the other ".african", chosen by lottery; and let all the enthusiastic africa/n web users chose which they prefer.

[WatAWorld]

Re: maybe

That would make it darn easy for the phishers to confuse people.

[Jason Bloomberg]

ICANN

A swamp which needs draining.

[Version 1.0]

Re: ICANN

So which billionaire would you like appointed to drain the swamp?

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: ICANN

William H Gates III?

[Moosh]

Awaiting the inevitable

iblesstherainsdownin.africa

[WatAWorld]

One can only wonder at the motivation of ICANN staff and council.

One can only wonder at the motivation of ICANN staff and council.

What would motivate them to try and pull this off?

They must have been motivated somehow.

How did ICANN progress so quickly to exceed FIFA in apparent absurdity and subterfuge?

[Yes Me]

Logic?

...the logic that it is possible for the .africa name to be redelegated at a future date. While that is theoretically possible, it demonstrates almost no understanding of how the internet registry market functions.

No, I think it demonstrates that the judge doesn't care; if redelegation occurs, it would hand all the registry operator's customers and future revenue to the new one. That would be some future judge's problem.

There is literally nothing that the addition of the .africa name to the internet will do to expand Africans' access to the internet addresses; it is simply a word.

Exactly right, which is why all the new Latin script TLDs created by ICANN are sheer stupidity except, of course, for the shysters who skim off the registration fees.