New York , November 06, 2008 – The interim government of Somalia has applied to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) seeking to regain control of the .so domain.

The government approached the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for help in regaining control of the domain, which has a registered office in the U.S. but is currently not operational

As the ITU does not run the registries, the organization has enlisted Jim Reid, founder of RTFM, to help Somalia transfer control of the domain to its Telecommunications Ministry.

"The process could take days, weeks or months; it depends on the workload of IANA staff," Reid said.

"It is unlikely that IANA will ignore a request from a sovereign government," he noted. "The organization in the U.S. will have to prove that it has permission from the Somali government to run the domain."

In reviving the domain operations, Reid said he has spoken with friends and has managed to get secondary name servers scattered around the world to host for at least two years until the situation is assessed. The servers are hosted in Australia , Canada , Japan , Singapore , Sweden and the U.S.

Somalia has been torn by civil war for 17 years, so there is no Internet Society chapter in the country.

Ahmed Ugas, chairman of the Somali ICT Development Association, recognized that the country faces communication challenges but noted that it is on the path of recovery.

"This is good progress," Ugas said of Reid's work. "It is important that the domain gets operational; then organizations can start using it."

Source: NetworkWorld, Nov 06, 2008