University of Guyana now accredits private companies to act as registrars of the .gy domain

Dear Editor,

On 21 August 2008, Stabroek News published a letter under the headline “Management of the .gy domain has fallen by the wayside.” The writer, who gave a name and address but asked that they be withheld, was an IT professional who had been urging clients to choose a .gy address over a .com, so that their businesses would read as Guyanese. The writer had paid the University of Guyana’s IT Centre for domain names almost two months earlier and had not received them. Emails to the administrator and the billing department went unanswered. The telephone numbers printed in the newspapers rang through to people who did not know where the registry staff were. Elsewhere in the world, the writer noted, a domain is issued within 24 hours. The letter ended with a question: what, exactly, was the oversight committee overseeing?

I found that letter last week while researching the history of our country’s domain. Stabroek News has since closed, and the journalists who kept its letters page running for decades now publish Kiskadee Watch. So I am answering here, eighteen years late, in the hope that it reaches the same readers and, with luck, the original writer.

The answer is that the problem the writer described has been solved, and not by a committee.

The University of Guyana remains the custodian of the .gy domain, as the Government entrusted it to be. What has changed is that the University now accredits private companies to act as registrars, in the same way that .com is sold by many companies rather than by one office. In April this year my company, Investigative Intelligence Solutions Inc., was accredited as a .gy registrar, and we launched Register.gy.

I built it because I had lived the 2008 letter myself. When my own firm needed the address iis.gy, the process took me about a week: a day to learn whether the name was free, a payment by MMG, a request for technical details I did not have to hand, and then two more days while someone entered them by hand. A week is better than two months. It is still a locked door for a shop owner who simply wants a website.

Today, on Register.gy, a Guyanese business searches for a name, pays by MMG in Guyana dollars or by card in US dollars, and the domain is registered at the registry within minutes. No one has to be chased. No form has to be carried anywhere. The system speaks directly to the registry, around the clock, including on weekends and holidays. Free DNS hosting and one-click email setup come with it, and there are people in Guyana who answer the phone and WhatsApp. The .gy, .com.gy, .co.gy, .net.gy and .org.gy extensions all cost the same, GYD 9,500 a year, and nearly a hundred businesses have registered in our first six months.

We have gone a step further than the writer could have imagined in 2008. Many Guyanese now build their websites by talking to artificial intelligence tools. Register.gy is built so that those same tools can connect a finished website to a .gy address on the customer’s behalf, with the changes shown first and applied only after the customer says yes. Any change can be undone for seven days.

I want to be careful about one thing. Register.gy is an accredited registrar. It is not the registry, and it is not the only accredited registrar. Any accredited registrar writes names into the same registry with the same rights. The credit for opening the door belongs to the University for choosing to accredit private registrars at all. What we did was walk through it and build the counter the 2008 writer was looking for.

The writer’s hope was that Guyanese businesses would carry a Guyanese address. In 2008 the entire .gy domain held a few thousand names. Last year more than 36,000 new business names were registered in this country. Most of them still live on a Facebook page. The door is open now. I would ask the writer, and every reader starting a business, to walk through it.

Yours faithfully,
Keron Bruce
Director, Investigative Intelligence Solutions Inc.