.ma is the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 country code

Country code

Country codes are short alphabetic or numeric geographical codes developed to represent countries and dependent areas, for use in data processing and communications. Several different systems have been developed to do this. The best known of these is ISO 3166-1...

 top-level domain

Top-level domain

A top-level domain is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in lower levels, it is the last part of the domain name, that is, the last label of a...

 (ccTLD) for Morocco

Morocco

Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...

. A local registrar with a local Moroccan company as administrative contact is needed to register an .ma or .co.ma domain name. Further restrictions are imposed on the registering of other second-level domains (such as .net.ma or .gov.ma).

History

In 1993, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority is the entity that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System , media types, and other Internet Protocol-related symbols and numbers...

 (IANA) approved a request for delegation of the .ma ccTLD for administrative and technical contact to Ecole Mohammadia d'Ingénieurs.

In 1995 the technical management of the .ma domain was taken over by Maroc Telecom

Maroc Telecom

Maroc Telecom is the main telecommunication company in Morocco.IAM employs around 11,178 employees. It has 8 regional delegations with 220 offices present on all the territory of Morocco.IAM is controlled by Vivendi which has a 53% share of its capital...

 is still the (not formal) technical maintainer.

On 12 May 2006 IANA redesignated the administrative and technical contact for the domain, and made ANRT the only official registrar for the .ma ccTLD.

Within some years the ANRT will request the market to bid on a "Technical maintainer" license which is valid for five years. The new party will get 12 months to implement a provisioning system based on Extensible Provisioning Protocol

Extensible Provisioning Protocol

The Extensible Provisioning Protocol is a flexible protocol designed for allocating objects within registries over the Internet.The motivation for the creation of EPP was to create a robust and flexible protocol that could provide communication between domain name registries and domain name...

. It is not expected that before 2013 the provisioning of .ma domains can be made completely automatic.

Practical information

• Total hosts of .ma: 36.669 (04/10/2010)

• Total internet users in Morocco: 7.300.000 (2006)

• Total ADSL connection in Morocco: 550.000 (2007)

Second-level domains

Registration can be done directly at the second level, or at the third level beneath these names:

• .ma: General use
• net.ma: Internet providers
• ac.ma: educational institutions
• org.ma: organizations
• gov.ma: governmental entities
• press.ma: the press and publications
• co.ma: commercial entities

Second top-level domain

A second top-level domain will be used for Morocco, intended for domain names in the local language, using Arabic characters. The string المغرب. has been registered and approved for this purpose, but it is not active yet (April 2011) and lower lever domains have not been granted yet.

External links

• IANA .ma whois information