WALUBENGO: Is KENIC's performance below standard?

Two weeks ago, Kenya Network Information Centre (KENIC) held its Annual General Meeting in a relatively low key event in Nairobi.

The few members were treated to documents that indicated that KENIC was doing well – or at least recovering from a previous year that saw it post losses.

Before we can evaluate KENIC, we need to understand its important role in the Kenyan Internet ecosystem. It is in charge of what is known as the country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD) – which is simply a technical way of saying it is in charge of the Kenyan identity within the global digital space.

INTERNET REGISTRY

Internet names such as nation.co.ke (CO.mmercial) ,mmu.ac.ke (AC.ademic) or treasury.go.ke (GO.vernment) all end with a suffix “dot.KE”; meaning that their registration is under the framework of KENIC, the national internet registry.

We can choose to evaluate KENIC's performance in many ways but let us limit ourselves to the following basic three indicators: functional, financial and organisational perspectives.

From a functional point of view, KENIC is simply a registry where registrars help users, businesses and organisations to reserve and register their internet names at a fee. The organisation keeps a couple of servers configured and running to ensure this registration takes place in a simplified and effective way.

Over the recent years, the number and duration of outages and downtime experienced by KENIC servers has been below the international standard.

This may be an indication that the technical and staff capability at KENIC may need to be improved – particularly considering the high turnover experienced in the recent past.

In addition, whereas the number of registered Kenyan internet domain increased to around 26,000 names, the domains per capita is still below average when compared to Egypt, South Africa or Nigeria.

Perhaps Kenyan organisations could help by registering local internet names instead of the foreign “dot.com”, “dot.net” amongst others.

On the financial front, the good news is that KENIC posted a surplus compared to the previous year when it incurred a significant deficit.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

Questions still linger on as to how a monopoly registry with less than five employees could manage to pull such a deficit - and what mechanisms are there to ensure that this does not occur again.

As for the organisational structure, KENIC is set for a change following a piece of legislation passed in the Kenya Communication Amendment Act (2008) which introduced regulation of the Kenyan Internet domain space.

Currently, KENIC is setup as a multi-stakeholder partnership between the state and the technical community. The key trustees being the Regulator (Communications Commission of Kenya) and TESPOK representing the government and the technical community respectively.

It is envisioned that CCK will relinquish its trustee role on the KENIC board in order to take up the regulatory role. However, other stakeholders have questioned the motive to have a regulatory control over the internet domain names in the first place.

Indeed if there is one lesson to learn from the “wikileaks” saga, then it is that attempting to regulate internet domain space is close to chasing after shadows – unless off course you have the resources and the socio-political attitude of China.

Only time will tell how KENIC performs on the above three indicators in the coming year.

Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at the Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT.