MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Falklands' in full control of .fk domain

For the first time all technical work on email addresses and websites ending in .fk is being done in the Falkland Islands.

Full control of the top level domain for the Falklands - .fk - is now in local hands with FIDC's Tim Cotter being the administrative contact and Cable and Wireless here in the Falklands being the technical contact.

.fk was registered by FIDC in 1997 with U-net who later became Via Networks doing all the technical work like creating the physical DNS records. A spokesperson for Cable and Wireless said this largely worked well, but in later years some serious delays in setting up new domains occurred, which prompted both FIDC and Cable and Wireless to bring the whole process under local control.

The spokesperson said that all top level domains like .fk are registered with IANA who manage such things for and on behalf of the wider internet community. FIDC approached IANA in early 2004 to start the process of changing the technical contacts and updating the administration contact information. However, this proved to be a very lengthy process requiring numerous forms and documentation to be prepared by FIDC, FIG, Cable and Wireless, Via Networks and even employees that had left FIDC.

Tim Cotter explained that, to keep internet traffic travelling smoothly, most countries in the world have a code which can be tagged onto the end of website and email addresses to show where they are administered. These are called Country Code Top Level Domains, or ccTLDs. Other examples of these are co.uk or .cl for Chile.

Any internet user with a physical presence in the Falklands can apply to register a sub-domain under .fk, such as horizon.fk or fig.fk. With only about 30 sub-domains registered under .fk, it is one of the smallest ccTLDs in the world. (PN).-