" ITREALMS: Registrars must submit to NiRA dispute resolution mechanism – Kalu

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Registrars must submit to NiRA dispute resolution mechanism – Kalu

POTENTIAL registrars for the nation’s Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD), .ng, must get ready to submit themselves to the dispute resolution strategies of the Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NiRA).

President, NiRA, Mr. Ndukwe Kalu, disclosed this last Friday in Lagos, while briefing the media on the way forward for the boosting of the nation’s ccTLD, dot ng, by Nigerians, especially now its seeking inputs on the 14-policy documents already up on NiRA website, www.nira.org.ng.

According to him a level of trust is needed from the registrars by the registrants on their ability to resolve disputes, whenever it any occurs and this means registrars must submit to NiRA’s mechanism for peaceful resolution of issues which is in line with global practices as outlined by ICANN and localised by the association.

Hence, NiRA must be satisfied with potential registrar ability to adequately adhere to this dispute mechanism without bias.

He described the recent Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between NiRA and the National Information Technology IT Development Agency (NITDA) as a new dawn in the annals of the Internet community in the country.

“This is truly a new dawn for the Nigerian Internet Community as we enter the last stretch of putting in place the structures to support a world-class registry,” he said.

Mr. Kalu also noted that it was based on ensuring globally accepted registry that NiRA board has given full attention to four-key institutional elements, namely the NiRA secretariat, policies and procedures as well as technical infrastructure and the service provider partners including registrars and dispute resolution mechanism.

He explained that on the NiRA secretariat, plans have commenced to engage the services of a consultant to help structure the proposed secretariat and recruit the required personnel.

“Our desire is to have a structure and manpower that would highly affect all sense of professionalism,” he declared.

Mr. Kalu equally said, that the board has released the first batch of policies and procedures for public input towards the determination of the final policies.

“These would guide the operations of NiRA and its primary function of .ng ccTLD management,” he noted, adding that the policies would be available for public inputs till February 29, 2008.

As said by him, it is after this period that all inputs would be collated and presented to the executive board for final amendments and approval.

“We expect that the final approved policies would be posted by March 10, this year, at the least,” he informed.

While urging Nigerians to embrace the call for comments by NiRA, he said, contributions could be forwarded through hard copy to NiRA office or electronic mail (email) to: policy@nira.org.ng

He went on to outline these domain policies to include NiRA policy development process, domain name policy, special domain name policy, fees policy, privacy policy, complaint policy and dispute resolution policy.

In addition, he listed the policies on general registration rules, registrant agreement, registrar agreement, registrar accreditation process and glossary as contained in the policy documents.

Further, he said there are four-policy documents specifically for good corporate governance in management of NiRA activities, namely the directors’ conflict of interest, meeting and information policies, technical infrastructure and service provider partners.

He emphasised that when all this would be in place, they would help in solidifying the foundation for NiRA to function and take the nation to the desired destination.

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