South African city domain names now open to the public

Starting today, companies have an opportunity to gain effective branding by having a domain of the city their business is based in. This of course is a lot more effective for companies that are based in local cities and not so much for national and international companies.

The ZA Central Registry (ZACR) has opened the three new domains to registration by the general public. The domains are .joburg, .durban or .capetown. Registration of names begins today 4 November 2014. Applicants are required to follow the usual process where applicants register names through their chosen accredited registrars or resellers, the ZACR said in a statement. The ZACR also operates the .co.za, .web.za, .org.za, .net.za domains.

“Different registrars will charge different prices due to bundled services they provide in addition to the basic domain name registration service,” said ZACR.

The numbers of people snatching up the domains has been impressive. Already .capetown has 623 applications, with 297 for .joburg and 250 for .durban. The reason behind .capetown surging number is a result of one person applying, for a what the ZACR reports to be, 237 domains.

ZACR reports that South Africa’s four major banks have applied for a city domain name. And that there are 32 auctions pending for domains that have more than one applicant. According to ZACR most of South Africa’s technology brands have applied for all three city domain names.

Global ecommerce giant Amazon and car-maker BMW have registered domains such as ‘amazon.durban’ and ‘bmw.durban’ during the last four months.

“The 1 170 applications for ZAdotCity domain names have been received during the parallel sunrise and land-rush periods managed by the ZACR,” a statement said.

“These time periods were designed to protect the rights of trademark holders prior to ZAdotCities domain names becoming available on a first-come, first-served basis from November 2014. This latter period is known as the general availability phase when intellectual property owners will no longer receive priority when it comes to registering domain names within South Africa’s three new city top-level domains.”

“From November, any Internet user globally with an affinity for South Africa’s three best-known cities will be able to register a South African city top-level domain on a first-come, first-served basis,” ZACR CEO Lucky Masilela said.

Annual registration fees for an SA city domains are expected to range between R200 and R300.

ZACR has developed a robust trademark protection system called the Mark Validation System, which can be accessed at www.markvalidation.co.za, in order to assist in mitigating against trademark abuses.