NITDA says non-existing MDAs seeking domain registration

National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has said that it has received requests for registration and assignment of domain names in the country’s Top Level Domain Name.

A country’s code Top Level Domain Name is the country’s identity in the cyberspace and for Nigeria, this is the .ng and websites that bear the ccTLD identify that they originate from Nigeria.

NIDTA had directed all government agencies and all organisations that belong to the government to migrate to the .gov.ng platform which clearly identifies that they are government organisations in Nigeria.

However, seeking to present the identity of the government, some fraudsters had applied for the registration and assignment of the domain name reserved for government organisations; perhaps to show off and defraud unsuspecting members of the public.

Speaking at the presentation of the Reviewed .gov.ng Policy in Abuja on Thursday, Mr Folayan Oluwasegun, head, Government Websites and Domains at NITDA, noted that NITDA had denied some applications because they were found to be originating from non-existing government organisations.

He said, “We have seen none existing MDAs requesting for domain names. When we see applications originating from existing MDAs, we revert to them after the necessary investigations. Some MDAs ask for two domain names. Sometimes, we reject such requests.”

Also speaking at the event, the Director General of NITDA, Dr Isah Ibrahim, disclosed that 138,060 entities had been registered on the country’s domain platform.

Ibrahim 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 of April 29. 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 per cent.

“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. We have also doubled the effort of the staff members of NITDA who have consistently ensured that better service delivery is made possible to all users of the government and military domains.”

The NITDA boss said that the automation for registration on .ng platform was in progress, adding that the process for clearing IT projects with NITDA had already been automated for ease of use by the MDAs.