ICANN: 2023 Africa Domain Name Industry Study

May 28, 2024

While domain names are the primary focus of this study, there are several inter-related factors that contribute to the health – or lack thereof – of the DNS industry within each African country. We found that the various countries were very diverse in how they have succeeded under various metrics. For example, Mali, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic, and Gabon had high numbers of domains because of these being given away by Freenom and SafeCow, some others have had some success in exploiting their ccTLDs potential for a domain hack, while others have not.

While many indices of various types are published, none of them met the specific requirement of this Study to quantify success in the DNS Industry in Africa. In addition, few of them consider all 54 countries. For example, one of the best known is the ITU’s ICT Development Index211. This has recently been revised212 and the 2023 edition213 was published in December 2023. This was after the publication of the Draft Final Report of this Study. This is unfortunately too late to enable extensive revision of this report to incorporate their figures.

However, it only had data for 39 Africa countries and was discontinued in 2017. As a result, we have developed a Country DNS Success Index (CDSI) based on a combination of the rankings of all 54 countries in Africa on each of the following criteria:

Number of domains registered under the ccTLD.
Number of gTLD domains identified as having an African Registrant.
Number of webpages indexed by Google.
Price of registration (Lower is better).
Number of Registrars.
Number of locally hosted websites.
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