Afghanistan Internet Faces Challenges: Panelists
Sanctions imposed on Afghanistan will hurt its internet, an Urban Media Institute webinar was told Tuesday. Afghanistan lags neighbors Iran and Pakistan, where the internet emerged in the 1990s, said Mujibullah Shams, a member of the National Information Technology Professional…
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Association of Afghanistan (NITPAA). Afghanistan was engaged in civil war then and, before 2002, the Taliban banned Western technologies such as broadcasting and the internet. When the new government took over in 2003, the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) .af was delegated to a government ministry. Around 327,0000 IP addresses are allocated to the country, which has about 12 million users. Afghanistan faces "enormous challenges," said NITPAA President Mohibullah Utmankhil, a professor at Kabul Polytechnic University. About 25 provinces have long been connected to fiber networks, but foreign aid supported these: There are some 63 registered ISPs, but since aid organizations pulled out, they're suffering financially. If this continues, Afghanistan could lose internet connections with its neighbors; and even maintaining its current IT infrastructure is in doubt, he said. Others such as Microsoft and Amazon are limiting their cloud services to the country, he said. It's reported that less than 10% of .af domain names are hosted in-country, and if anywhere they're hosted imposes sanctions, that may affect those domains, he said. The ccTLD itself is outside Taliban control, but the government has apparently locked all gov.af domains, he noted. The Afghan internet community is committed to bringing the technology to the country, said Digital Medusa Director Farzaneh Badii. But the ccTLD .af could become dormant if registrars can't register af. domain names, or if the Taliban or some other regime takes control of the ccTLD, she said. Even registries that manage generic TLDs such as .com have become "sensitive" about providing services to residents of sanctioned nations, she said. Another worry is that IP addresses could be pulled back from Afghanistan, severing its connection to the world, she noted. ICANN doesn't play a day-to-day role in ccTLD management because that's a local responsibility, emailed a spokesperson. The decision to remove responsibility for a domain to a different entity must be arrived at locally, including by the government in charge, and would be submitted to ICANN for recognition, she wrote. The .af domain is managed by the Ministry of Communications IT, she added. "Any ICANN assessment relating to a requested change is limited to ensuring ongoing stability of the domain is preserved and the request is in accordance with local decision-making."