A small West African country recently savaged by civil war, Sierra Leone currently ranks at the very bottom of the Human Development Index, beset by crushing poverty and civil corruption. Among its sole exports are precious minerals, but during the war, those became a means to fund the conflict. (This is the backdrop for the recent Leo Decaprio/Djimon Hounsou film, Blood Diamond.)
Sierra Leone's latest export? Internet addresses with the country's top level domain, ".sl"-- in other words, an attractive alternative for organizations and individuals who want to create a site based around their Second Life activity. Registration is apparently offered here by a group called AFCom, which claims to be authorized to do so by Sierra Leone's National Telecommunications Commission. I say "apparently", because it's been difficult to independently confirm this deal on an official government site, so caveat avatar. (I e-mailed a message the company last week, but so far haven't received a reply.) This would not be an unprecedented service, however: anytime you see a site with ".tv" at the end, you're looking at a company that's registered its URL with the Polynesian kingdom of Tuvalu.
News of this African regristrar comes from Portuguese metaverse commercial developer and analyst Gwyneth Llewelyn, who's already registered gwynethllewelyn.sl, as a redirect to her main site. Recently, Linden Lab changed its trademark policies to prohibit unauthorized third parties from using any variation of "Second Life" in their second level domain name. But this wouldn't apply to sites using ".sl", since that's long been Sierra Leone's official top level domain. And by that twist of fate, the world's poorest country has evidently become one of the most attractive exporters of metaverse websites.
Image composite: www.nic.sl and photo of Koidu Town, Sierra Leone from the country's Wikipedia entry.
Fifty bucks a year . . . that nearly gave me sticker shock until I realized that comes to about 4 bucks and change a month, which may not be too bad. (Then again, I pay seven bucks a year for each of my domains, so maybe I'm a bit spoiled.)
Posted by: CyFishy Traveler | Monday, August 11, 2008 at 04:47 PM
I have "katharine.sl" and "berry.sl" (but not "katharineberry.sl" >.>). And thus the email address [email protected].
Posted by: Katharine Berry | Monday, August 11, 2008 at 05:58 PM
So I can drop an entire year's hosting on another domain and add it to the list of my domains nobody visits anyway rofl.
I'll pass. Like I want to hand them a credit card number anyway. Oh wait they can get it from Barnes & Noble easier rofl.
What a life.
Posted by: Ann Otoole | Monday, August 11, 2008 at 10:28 PM
avatar.sl might be interesting
I tried to register in.sl a while ago, but it said it can't do two-letter domain names. To bad. That was the only one I _really_ wanted. ;)
Posted by: vint falken | Tuesday, August 12, 2008 at 05:13 AM
Way too expensive.
Posted by: Nexii Malthus | Tuesday, August 12, 2008 at 02:49 PM
I heard the Easter Island domain is apparently pretty popular with goat owners...
Posted by: Two Worlds | Tuesday, August 12, 2008 at 07:30 PM
I imagined that everybody would be complaining about the price :) Well, we're mostly spoilt by how cheap .com, .net, .org, .info etc. names are — in my country (Portugal), the price of a .pt domain is exactly the same price as a .sl domain — and last time I checked, Portugal was not ravaged by "crushing poverty and civil corruption" and the registrar for .pt domains is not even a wildly speculative organisation but the local equivalent of the American NCSA. Granted, they are academic control freaks.
So for people like me who are used to pay a way higher cost for a domain name don't see the price tag for .sl as being too cumbersome.
It's also great that AFcom (a major ISP in Sierra Leone) replaced the previous .sl registrar. As many of you might imagine, lots of people have been contacting them in the past 4 years to get .sl domains registered (yes, including Linden Lab). They had an address somewhere in Sierra Leone that never answered to emails, letters, or phone calls, and they just had two or three domains registered under .sl (their own and of a couple of local companies). It was basically a "dead registrar". So thankfully someone finally broke that long-standing impasse and assigned the registration to AFcom, which at least is a serious company doing serious business for several years now.
My experience with nic.sl was actually pretty smooth (I expected much worse service). Their registration site is minimalistic but it works. In spite of the warnings that they did some of the steps manually, I have no reason to doubt that my own registrations were automatic, since they were quite fast (less than an hour for the domains to propagate) and happened very late in Sierra Leone's night. They accept PayPal (even though I dislike them more and more) so at least you can hide your credit card and rest assured that AFcom won't be ripping you off.
Then again, the real question is what will Linden Lab say about this :) (My guess is that they will silently ignore the issue). And a secondary issue is, of course, domain name hoarding by less scrupulous people who will register all sort of .sl domains for popular SL sites that might have some doubts if they should register their own .sl domain now or wait and see what happens — until, of course, it's too late.
Posted by: Gwyneth Llewelyn | Saturday, August 16, 2008 at 05:28 AM