There are some 2 million Nigerians, who own Yahoo email accounts-so-called free email account, according to Nigeria Internet Registration Association (Nira).
Opeoluwa Odusan, chief operating officer, Nira, said that Yahoo was able to attract this number of Nigerians to its email portal because the company offered the service free.
He urged the federal government to replicate similar incentive to encourage Nigerian businesses to register with .ng which is the country’s top level domain name.
According to him, government could offer incentives such as one year tax break for any business that is registered on.ng or enter into public private partnership with information and communications technology companies that are capable of building hybrid data centres using energy efficient power to make the hosting of websites in the country cheaper.
This is coming against the backdrop of handful of businesses that are registered in the country’s domain name compared to those registered in foreign domain names.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek investigations revealed that there are only 40,000 businesses registered in .ng while .com, .net and .org account for 600,000 of Nigerian businesses.
It was also gathered that other foreign domain names outside the three mentioned has some 50,000 Nigeria businesses on them, bringing the total of 650,000 of Nigerian businesses that are registered with foreign domain names.
Registration of business in foreign domain is another form of capital flight as such domain names are renewed with about $7 each every year.
It would be recalled that Nira in order to further encourage the adoption of .ng, Nigeria’s identity on the Internet, slashed the registration fees from N200,000 to N15,000.
This however increased the traffic volume around .ng to 700 domain names registered weekly.
More so, Nira in collaboration with Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria organized a Local Internet Content forum aimed at increased Nigerian content on the Internet, the hosting of such content, locally, and an increased adoption of .ng as the domain name of choice, particularly among Nigerians.