Virtual sovereignty
Amidst news of renewed fighting among real-life combatants, the struggle for Afghanistan's virtual sovereignty has been quietly concluded. In late February, in a concrete government office building in Kabul, the first post-Taliban email with a .af suffix leapt from the keyboard of a UNDP technician to the computer screen of the country's minister of communications, Muhammad Masoom Stanakzai. The transmission marked the end of a struggle launched in 2001 after the Taliban departed Kabul to put the .af back in Afghanistan, where it rightfully belongs.
While the Taliban administration was not generally known for technophilia, in 1997, Abdul Razeeq of Kabul registered .af with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). But after three years of protecting Afghanistan's virtual territory, Razeeq dropped out of contact with the IANA, and disappeared leaving little more than a forwarding email address supported by a server in Peshawar, Pakistan. When the UN set out to reclaim Afghanistan's Internet terrain, Razeeq's disappearance caused delays until the IANA could be persuaded to award .af to Hamid Karzai's young government on the grounds that Razeeq had defaulted on his duty to protect and serve the national suffix. The last hurdle to Afghanistan becoming virtually self-sufficient is the transfer of .af hardware to Kabul from its present residence at UN headquarters in New York, now scheduled for 2004.
Bhutan, owner of the .bt suffix, joined the nation-state Internet club in 1999. After years of dragging its feet, Thimpu accepted a UNDP offer to put the Druk kingdom online for the 25th anniversary of King Jigme Singye Wangchuck's coronation. Rather than an Internet absconder, Thimpu first had to face off with a major multinational – British Telecommunications PLC – for control of .bt, a brief confrontation that reportedly ended with minimal trouble.
The approach of Nepal to its own online sovereignty is unique in that a private company administers the .np territory. In 1994, just as regional techie behemoth India was coming online, Mercantile Communications in Kathmandu registered the .np suffix through an Australian-based server. To facilitate Internet growth and prevent cyber-squatting, Mercantile allowed any .np domain name to be registered on the condition that the site name would correspond to the service provided. Thus, for example, www.golf.com.np would only be awarded to someone providing information on Nepal's handful of golf links (Himalayan golfers be advised, the site is under construction), and www.mcdonalds.com.np will only be awarded if the country suffers the misfortune of colonisation by the golden arches. According to Mercantile, the Nepali government is fine with a private company regulating the nation's cyberspace and has no interest in taking over control. And why should it? It is making use of www.nepalhmg.gov.np for free.