By Modupe Gbadeyanka
Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) in Nigeria, Mr Isa Pantami, has disclosed that the total number of registered .ng domains from inception till April 29, 2019 was now 138,060.
Speaking at the Sensitization Forum and Presentation of the Reviewed, gov.ng & .mil.ng Policy to stakeholders in Abuja recently, the NITDA chief said from this number, 2,274 are .gov.ng while 278 are .mil.ng.
According to Wikipedia, .ng is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Nigeria.
On May 13, 2009, IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) completed the process of re-delegation of the .ng domain name from temporary authorities to the current Nigerian ones. For many years, Randy Bush had been the Technical contact of the .ng domain name. With the IANA re-delegation, the technical contact is now the local Nigerian DNS administrator, while the administrative contact is the president of Nigeria Internet Registration Association.
To speed up the process of registering .ng domain names, NIRA has accredited a first batch of 29 Domain registrars, most of whom are Nigerian companies. Registrars are categorized into Platinum, Gold, Silver and Standard categories.
At the Abuja workshop, the NITDA DG said his agency has handed over the administration of the .ng string to the Nigerian Internet Registration Association (NIRA).
NITDA is also mandated to ensure Internet governance and supervision of the management of the country code top-level domain (cctld.ng) on behalf of all Nigerians. The .ng string as we all know is Nigeria’s flagship identity and it is the role of NITDA to supervise the management of this huge national resource
“In line with global best practice, where the country top level domain in every country is not directly managed by the government, but by multi-stakeholder bodies’ setup by the government, NITDA has delegated the management responsibilities of the .ng string in Nigeria to NiRA. The government then plays a supervisory role in the administration of the domains” he said.
“We are happy to see the growth trend of .gov.ng and .mil.ng in Nigeria in recent times. The total number of registered .ng domains from inception till date, stands at 138,060 (as at April 29, 2019). From this number, 2,274 are .gov.ng while 278 are .mil.ng. It is worthy to note that the total number of .gov.ng and .mil.ng domains registered from inception till October 2016 were 1,856.
“This means that 418 new domains were registered between November 2016 and April 2019, which signifies a percentage increase of 18.3%. This can be attributed to the various drives embarked upon by the agency at ensuring the adoption of the .gov.ng and the .mil.ng,” Mr Patanni said further.
According to him, the agency has embarked on various initiatives aimed at ensuring that government business is done on government domains.
MDAs using .gov.ng domains will be ranked first when search is conducted through search engines like Google.
.gov.ng or .mil.ng domains offers the confidence that whoever is relating with a particular MDA is sure that such transactions are genuine and free of fraudulent activities.
The .gov.ng and .mil.ng domains are free and they are without rentals and does not require foreign exchange to purchase or subscribe.
Websites that are .ng and are hosted locally will be resolved faster with minimum hops. This is in-view of the high-speed performance offered by the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN). This is important because speed is an important factor in ranking websites.
Adedapo Adesanya 
Business Post Contributor