Consumers in African countries are paying some of the highest rates in the world for internet access as a proportion of income, due to a lack of competition in local markets according to a new report released Tuesday. The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) assessed 136 low and middle-income countries for their annual Affordability Report. …
Across Africa, where less than a third of the population has access to broadband connectivity, achieving universal, affordable, and good quality internet access by 2030 will require an investment of US $100 billion. This is according to a report launched at the Annual Meetings of the World Bank Group, which calls for urgent action to …
Benin held parliamentary elections Sunday leaving citizens without access to opposition candidates and the internet. Social media platforms including WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as well as Spacetel—Benin’s leading internet provider—was shut down according to NetBlocks (a digital monitoring organization), Quartz Africa reports. VPNs were also blocked. This makes Benin the latest African country alongside …
Earlier this year in February ICANN announced that it was free to proceed with the delegation of .AFRICA domain following a Court decision that denied DotConnectAfrica’s (DCA’s) Motion for Preliminary Injunction to stop the delegation of the .AFRICA generic top-level domain (gTLD) to ZA Central Registry (ZACR). The case had been remanded to State court …
The ICANN new gTLD process attracted over 1,930 new applications to be added into the root from 60 countries and territories. Of the applications received, 66 were geographic name applications while 116 applications made for Internationalized Domain Names, or IDNs, for strings in scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, and Cyrillic. Broken down by ICANN’s geographic …
The largest online retailer Amazon has prevailed after appealing against a decision by ICANN to deny applications for the .amazon generic top-level domain (gTLD).The domain had been halted in 2014 after the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) asked the New gTLD Program Committee to reject the domains based on objections from Brazil and Peru, which share …
The .Africa gTLD can be re-delegated to DCA in the event DCA prevails in this litigation, says California Judge ICANN announced last Friday that it is free to proceed with the delegation of .AFRICA domain following a recent Court decision that denied DotConnectAfrica’s (DCA’s) Motion for Preliminary Injunction to stop the delegation of the .AFRICA …
DCA Trust is contesting a .Africa Court decision that was made over the Christmas holiday that went contrary to a previous tentative ruling. “DCA believes that all of the reasons that the Court was inclined to grant the PI still stand”. The Thursday December 22, 2016, 7 page tentative ruling [PDF] issued by the Los …
The new gTLD process has created many precedents, apart from being the largest ever single expansion of domains; it has also raised pertinent issues that touch on many spheres of ethics, human rights, ownership, brands among others. .Africa is among the most controversial domains having gone through an unprecedented path of accountability. The domain has …
Sophia Bekele the Founder of DCA Trust has joined other voices to advance her long held advice that IANA transition should not be privatized to the interest of the very few. Writing yesterday on The Hill, Bekele says: What I do not agree is when public policy positions are manipulated to serve the few. I …