Cybersurf

Hello good morning and welcome to that internet show of shows – Cybersurf – a weekly look at the web. I am your Cyberhost, Steven Lang, who last week had a look at the web from a very different perspective.

I attended the AfriNIC two meeting in Maputo Mozambique, where a whole bunch of super-techies discussed a whole bunch of super techie things such as IPv6, reverse DNS and who should go to APRICOT. This “intro” was not meant to scare normal listeners off – it was designed to show you how intimidated I was when I saw the program.

First of all, what is AfriNIC?

AfriNIC is the internet numbers registry for Africa. All web sites in the world have an internet address, such as sabcnews.com for example – but these addresses are actually codified numbers, when your computer looks for an internet address it does not look for the words - sabcnews.com – it looks for the coded number – or IP address.

All the IP addresses in the whole world are allocated by ICANN – or the Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers. ICANN obviously cannot give numbers directly for every single web site in the world – it allocates large blocks of numbers to regional internet registries. AfriNIC is one of five such Regional Internet Registries.

The Regional registries in turn allocate blocks of addresses to Local internet registries or internet service providers where you or I can purchase a single internet address.

The significance of last week’s AfriNIC meeting in Maputo lay in the fact that it was the first such meeting of the organisation after its official recognition by ICANN. Up until March this year, African internet service providers had to receive blocks of numbers from either the European, North American or Asia Pacific registries.

Now the African continent has its own regional internet registry – you can find out more about it at www.afrinic.net – let me spell that out A F R I N I C dot net.

At last week’s Maputo meeting, the other four regional registries made presentations giving advice on how they apply certain policies and us Africans discussed how these policies should be applied.

Note that I said, us Africans – I chose the word carefully because that is all you need to qualify to be able to give input into AfriNIC. It was an open meeting, where any African can just walk in and participate in discussions that will determine how the internet is administered in Africa. If you missed it, don’t worry, there will be others – in fact the next one is in Cairo in November.

Of course most of us will not be able to pop off to Cairo just to attend the meeting – But you can provide as much input as you want on the afrinic.net web site.

Go to the Contacts section and there you will find all the relevant addresses as well as policy mailing lists.

And do not be intimidated by the Geek speak – it is really not that tricky and I have found that if you do not understand something, they will be only to happy to explain it again, and in my case – again and again.

That’s it for today – if you would like to read the script for this program – you will find it at Cybersurf.blogspot.com – one more time – Cybersurf.blogspot dot com

Thanks for listening, and remember to keeeep on surfing.

Relevant Links:

AfriNIC: - http://www.afrinic.net

AfNOG: - http://www.afnog.org/

Working Group on Internet Governance: - http://www.wgig.org/

Telkom: - http://www.telkom.co.za

World Summit on the Information Society: - http://www.itu.int/wsis/

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers: - http://www.icann.org/

On SABCnews.com

AfriNIC prices slashed to attract new members (Apr 28 2005 11:00)

Goodwill for the future of the internet in Africa (Apr 27 2005 07:30)

New internet addresses present new opportunities (Apr 27 2005 07:30)