The « .africa » domain name

At its 29th Summit held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on 3 July 2017, the African Union (AU) officially launched the "dot.africa" domain name as a first step in building the continent's digital identity. An awareness campaign was announced in its wake to encourage African companies and institutions to adopt the new African domain name, "in order to tell our own story".

As a reminder, in order to communicate with another person or access content on the Internet, every user must enter a unique address in the browser of their computer (or smartphone), so that the communicating computers know where and how to find each other. This is called the "domain name system", which corresponds to a simple directory containing, on one side, the unique number of connected machines (IP address) and, on the other, the name the user types to communicate with the machine they want (larc.africa for example). This functionality is generally transparent to the user and managed by domain name servers (DNS servers).

The economic and strategic stakes of the domain name system (DNS)

Many African digital actors had welcomed the news of the launch of a pan-African domain name with great enthusiasm. For, as many often forget, in the age of all-digital, the domain name is a major strategic and economic-intelligence stake, which helps define the complex concepts of cyber-territory and digital sovereignty.

Indeed, at the logical layer of cyberspace, the volume of active domain names can be a relevant element for assessing the weight of your online presence [as a country or continent], but also for theorising the notion of "digital borders". The space you occupy is thus proportional to the number of users of the domain names under your control (so the more your extension is used, the more you mark your identity and, in a way, your territoriality in cyberspace).

Following this logic, it is therefore reasonable to say that the African cyber-territory is (at least from this point of view) invaded, because even today, out of nearly 527 million active internet users on the continent (as of 31 May 2020), the number of national extensions in use (top-level domain names such as dot.cm for Cameroon, dot.sn for Senegal, dot.ci for Côte d'Ivoire, etc.) is barely 3 million in all of Africa. The reason is simple: most users prefer the "dot.com" or "dot.net" extensions, and international organisations favour "dot.org" or "dot.int". These very popular domain names are, from a technical standpoint, more stable, more reliable and therefore more practical. This, in addition to their seniority, may explain their popularity.

Paradoxically, four years after the official launch of the "dot.africa" domain, even the continental institutions—which nonetheless promote the use of African domain names in their discourse—do not lead by example! This is the case of the African Union (au.int), of the entity in charge of the continent's digital transformation (smartafrica.org), the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (cemac.int), the Economic Community of West African States (ecowas.int), etc. This practice simply demonstrates a poor understanding of the stakes underway in the world on this subject, and more broadly raises the problem of digital sovereignty.