The Electronic Communications and Transactions (ECT) Bill currently before Parliament makes provision for government to take control of the .za space through a non-profit domain name authority. The minister of communications would appoint all the directors of the authority and set the policy under which it would operate. Government would be the only member and shareholder of the authority under an exception from the Companies Act.

The government says it has a duty to administer the .za domain as a national asset, but others feel it is stepping over the line.

“What you have here is a bizarre situation where a politician can start determining technical standards, which aren't South African technical standards but international technical standards arrived at by some form of consensus,” says IT lawyer Mike Silber about the planned authority. Silber is a member of the board of Namespace, an organisation formed to take control of the .za domain.

Silber also points out that the section of the ECT Bill dealing with the .za domain is the most comprehensive. It goes into much detail and covers 15 pages. In contrast, chapter three of the Bill, which seeks to make electronic messages legally recognised and is seen as the heart of the Bill, takes up only 10 pages.

The current administrator of .za, Mike Lawrie, has been handling the domain since its inception. He points out that the Bill does not differentiate between a host name and a domain name and believes this means any company that intends to establish a host under a .za domain would have to be licensed to do so.

Such issues make him fear for the stability of the domain. Lawrie would prefer to see .za administered by a body with government representation, but not controlled by the State. He will not allow the opposite to happen lightly, vowing not to approve the handover of .za to government. Refusing to do so would make it difficult for government to gain international recognition of the handover.

However, this is not the way he would prefer things to go.

“I do not seek confrontation if there is a better way,” he says.

Lawrie is also a member of Namespace, a body which is structured with government participation in mind. Namespace intends to appeal to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Communications to remove, or fundamentally change, the ECT Bill provisions on the domain authority.

The Bill is open to public comment until 20 April.

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