AfriNIC or the Africa’s Regional Registry for Internet Number Resources is the regional internet registry or RIR for Africa. It was launched in 2004 and became operational in 2005. Just this week, ICANN and AfriNIC has announced that it will launch an initiative to increase African tech leaders to participate and be actively influential in the ICANN domain community.

The initiative was brought by Steve Crocker, Chairman of ICANN’s Board of Directors during the June Meeting at Prague, Czech Republic. It was attended by the new CEO Fadi Chehadé and the acting CEO Akram Atallah with African community members.

The primary purpose of the meeting in Prague which also happened to be the 44th public meeting of ICANN was to establish a framework and strategy on boosting the tech industry of Africa as well making sure that African tech leaders participate in the ICANN meetings and gatherings. The initial plan for the ICANN and AfriNIC’s strategy is scheduled on October 2012 at the Public Meeting in Toronto, Canada. The initiative will also booster the promotion of the multi-stakeholder model in Africa at the government, corporate and any other types of organization.

Tarek Kamel of Egypt will serve as the Senior Advisor on global issues and will closely work on the Africa initiative. Tarek is well known for outstanding achievements in promoting the Internet and its multi-stakeholder model in the third world and rising countries.

With this new initiative, we can expect tech businesses in Africa to have a strong presence in the global market. Startups are doing well in the African region now and investors are conducting events like the Startups World to discover new tech businesses and developers.

A recent survey from a top IT magazine site Mashable shows the top 10 most suggested domain name extensions or TLD from internet users.

1.) .winning
2.) .dotdot
3.) .omg
4.) .joy
5.) .YOLO
6.) .matrix
7.) .WWW
8.) .bamf
9.) .iuseapigeonformymail
10.) .Pwned

The suggested domains are unlikely but it is due to most domain extensions are corporate like .com, .org or country-based like .au, .us, .ph but if those 10 domains got approved (or if someone crazy enough applied for it especially the TLD .iuseapigeonformymail) i think I will buy one – just for fun.

Google recently filed for ownership of Top-level domains .doc for its google docs, .youtube for their entertainment and video sharing site, .lol for some humor purposes and spending almost $200,000 per application of TLD’s. Although this domain extensions sound fun, someone still needs to shed huge amount of money to register them.

There are hundreds of pending top level domain being processed by ICANN right now and this is a proof that the internet industry is booming and we will be seeing new bizarre domain extensions in the future.

Free your domain (Photo – Freedom Registry)

It depends on what you’re getting, how much control you have over it and what you can use it for.

For example, getting a free .blog domain from Google is not really a freebie domain.

It’s just something they let you use as long as you host it as a blog on their Blogger service.

That’s not much better than a yourname.blogspot.com kind of deal.

The best deal currently on offer is probably the .TK domain registration, which is entirely free with no quid pro quo. It’s the only country level domain you are going to get for free, because Tokelau’s Freedom Registry does not charge buyers for handing out .tk domains. I wonder what new ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé would say about this.

It was all started as a business idea by Joost Zuurbier fromAmsterdam, who convinced the Tokelauns it was a good idea and then convinced ICANN to allow a country-level domain for Tokelau, which covers all of 4 sq miles on three remote islands in thePacific Ocean.

Today, .tk is the third most popular country domain afterGermany’s .de domain and theUnited Kingdom’s .uk domain. There are already more than 9 million registered .tk domains. The registry is now so popular they are getting around a million more registrations each month.

The only requirement is that the domain should get at least 25 unique visitors every 90 days. The Freedom Registry makes its money by putting ads on expired domains that have been abandoned but still keep getting some residual traffic.

.Org domains (Photo – PIR.org)

The 10 millionth registration was Jadforum.org, registered by the Jordan River and Dead Sea Basin Forum. JAD is an organization dedicated to sustainable water resource development.

The number of registered ORG domains has been growing steadily at a rate of about nine to 10 percent per year for the last three years. Total growth since 2005 has been in excess of 156 percent.

ORG was created in 1984 as one of the internet’s original TLDs along with COM, NET, EDU, GOV and MIL. ORG still retains its place as the third largest generic top-level domain in the world.

These 10 million domains have been registered through a network of 400 registrars by non profits, global foundations, local charities and other organizations across 175 countries. There is no restriction on who can buy an ORG domain or how it can be used. An ORG domain can just as well be used for commercial and for profit activities. In fact, last year PIR hit another milestone when the number of ORG domains outside North America exceeded those within.

After an intensive bidding process in 2002, the ICANN Board handed over control of ORG operations to PIR in January 2003. The transition was the biggest ever in the history of the internet. In a single day, 2.6 million ORG domain names were moved to PIR from the old registry. The transfer did not impact or take down any ORG website or registrant.

User’s browsing the net on Google’s Chrome will drive massive volumes of traffic to the owners of top level domains. In the Chrome browser, the multi-purpose explorer field is also used as the search field. When a user types the word ‘jobs’ into the search field to perform a Google search, the browser will automatically redirect to .jobs.

Whether Google plans to adjust the search/explore field to accommodate top level domains remains to be seen when the domains are launched and Chrome is launched out of Beta.

Excerpted from here.