Afghanistan to Launch Internet Domain
Posted on: Sunday, 9 March 2003, 06:00 CST
Afghanistan to Launch Internet Domain
source: Associated Press Tech News
"Planting its flag in cyberspace," Afghanistan will officially activate its .af Internet domain name on Monday for Afghan e-mail addresses and Web sites, officials and the United Nations said.
The effort, a joint collaboration between the U.N. Development Program and the Afghan Ministry of Communications, marks a giant technological leap for a country where the Internet was banned for years during the former Taliban regime. But it is likely to be a long time before the average, impoverished Afghan citizen will be able to afford to explore the new possibilities.
"Equivalent to a country code for telephone numbers, the .af Internet suffix has now been reserved exclusively for private and official e-mail and World Wide Web users in Afghanistan," UNDP said in a statement.
"Afghanistan is officially planting its flag in cyberspace, gaining full legal and technical control of the '.af' Internet domain," the organization said.
The .af domain was first registered with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority in October 1997 by a private Afghan citizen named Abdul Razeeq, according to Aimal Marjan, an adviser to the minister of communications.
According the IANA Web site, however, Razeeq later disappeared and some services were halted to the .af domain.
Efforts to relaunch it began again after the Taliban were ousted in a U.S.-led war in late 2001.
"For Afghanistan, this is like reclaiming part of our sovereignty," Communications Minister Mohammad Moassom Stanakzai said in a statement on Sunday.
So far, just two Web sites have been registered under the .af domain, one belonging to the Ministry of Communications, the other to UNDP. As of Sunday, the ministry site was still "under construction."
Despite the Internet's spread around the world in the last decade, it remains a rarity in Afghanistan, which is still struggling to recover from more than two decades of near-continuous warfare.
A handful of Internet cafes have sprung up in the war-battered capital, Kabul, since last summer, but online time is too expensive for the average citizen, who typically earns less than a dollar a day.
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On the Net:
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority: http://www.iana.org
Afghan Ministry of Communications: http://www.moc.gov.af
U.N. Development Program, Afghanistan: http://www.undp.org.af
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