South Africa’s ZA Central Registry NPC (ZACR) is motivating for a price increase in the wholesale registration and renewal fee for co.za, web.za. org.za and net.za domains.
The current annual domain fee of R45 has been unchanged since 2014, and ZACR is asking for this to be increased to R55.
The ZACR is the non-profit administrator of South Africa’s second-level domain presence on the web. ZACR also administers the .africa, .joburg, .capetown and .durban domain name spaces.
The organisation points out that the .za domain namespace has performed admirably during the national lockdown, with not one minute of downtime. None of the other domains managed by the registry have ever experienced any downtime related to the performance or otherwise of ZACR and its predecessor over the past three decades.
“The local web is a South African success story and a case study in African excellence,” the organisation argues in a statement released today. “However, going forward ZACR needs fair annual inflation-related adjustments in the price it charges its Registrar & Reseller (RaR) partners to provision domains like co.za. A fair upwards fee adjustment will prevent this crucial national ICT asset falling into disrepair.
“South Africa’s domain name industry regulator, ZADNA (The ZA Domain Name Regulatory Authority), is currently engaging the industry on the .ZA SLD (Second Level Domain) Wholesale Fee Review,” the statement adds. “This specifically entails determining if the wholesale price of Internet domain names ending in co.za, net.za, org.za and web.za should be adjusted from the current annual registration and renewal fee of R45.
“The lack of inflation-related annual increases over the past 6 years has been unfortunate considering South Africa slipped above the Reserve Bank’s targeted 3% to 6% consumer inflation band on several occasions since 2014.”