The local chapter of the Internet Society, ISOC-ZA, says the planned non-profit company that is to oversee the registration of domain names across the .za namespace will come into operation in September.
The Section 21 company, Namespace South Africa, is to be formed at a meeting scheduled for 31 August, which will probably see the deregulation of domain registration in September.
Namespace has been a long time coming, with a committee to steer the process of its formation chosen in February 1999 after the current administrator, Mike Lawrie, expressed his wish to hand his post over to a formal body.
Namespace is to be an open membership body, with free and automatic membership for any individual or company with one or more registered domains in the .za space. Other interested parties will be able to join at a nominal R20 fee.
The company will be steered by a board of nine individuals, of which six will be elected by the membership and one each appointed by ISOC-ZA, domain registrars and the government.
ISOC-ZA chairman William Stucke says the first board will decide how domains are to be registered in future, but it is likely that it will be deregulated and competition introduced. "The proposed policy for Namespace envisages competitive registrars, probably in the .co.za and .org.za spaces," he says.
Some spaces under .za, such as .gov.za, .mil.za and .ac.za, are closed groups where domains may only be registered by authorised bodies, while others, such as .nom.za, have never gained widespread acceptance. However, .co.za and .org.za are widely used.
Currently each of these spaces has a single registrar and UniForum, the .co.za registrar, is likely to be the basis of the first for-profit registrar in SA.
"It is speculation, but UniForum may change itself and hand its funds over to Namespace to benefit the Internet community," Stucke says. "It could then hive off the mechanism for registering the domain names it has." UniForum is a non-profit organisation.
Namespace is billed as an interim administrative body, although there are no immediate plans to supersede it. It is also seen as a pre-emptive move by the Internet community to prevent government from taking control of the registration process.
The Department of Communications and its director-general Andile Ngcaba have said the government has a role to play in administrating domain names, even proposing the establishment of domain authority with a R24 million price tag for taxpayers. The E-commerce Green Paper, which may be signed into law later this year, also makes provision for a legal system of domain registration controlled by government.
However, the inclusion of a government representative is explained as facilitating communication between Namespace and the government, and Stucke says the government supports it.
"The Department of Communications has expressed its support for the formation of this body and the transfer of administration," he says.
He also says the term "interim" is used in describing Namespace specifically as there is acknowledgement that government may take a more active role in domain registration in the future.
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External links:
http://www.namespace.org.za/
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