[News] Domain Squatters Swoop As Govt Fails To Secure ‘Nigeria Air’ Domains Before Announcement

The artist impression of Nigeria Air plane/iafrikan.com

It seems Nigeria’s government overlooked registering the relevant and more important domain names for the “Nigeria Air” brand in their planning and branding processes.

The Minister of State for Aviation, Hadi Sirika, on Wednesday unveiled the name of Nigeria’s national carrier, as well as the logo at the Farnborough International Airshow in London.

The three most important domains – NigeriaAir.com, NigeriaAir.ng, and NigeriaAir.com.ng – are all not owned by Nigeria’s government at the time of publishing, reports iAfrikan.com.

According to publicly available WHOIS records, NigeriaAir.com is registered and owned by a certain “J H Kim” from the Republic of Korea. Interestingly, NigeriaAir.com was first registered in 2004.

Also, at the time of publishing this article, NigeriaAir.com was using a domain parking service with a message that the owner could be interested in selling the domain.

NigeriaAir.ng and NigeriaAir.com.ng, which are both not active, according to WHOIS records, were registered on Wednesday, 18 July 2018. That’s the same day that Nigeria’s Minister of Aviation announced the West African country’s plans to launch Nigeria Air before the end of 2018.

What is even more interesting according to iAfrikan is that both Nigeria Air domains with a Nigeria top-level domain (TLD) name are registered by Olumayowa Elegbede, who confirmed his ownership of the domain names. Furthermore, since registering them, Elegbede has also put both domains up for sale.

In May 2014, ICANN made the.FLIGHTS TLD available for general public registration. The TLD is usually used by airlines, travel agencies and other aviation and travel related organizations. It turns out, Nigeria’s government didn’t register NigeriaAir.flights as well (or at least until 21 July 2018).

According to WHOIS records, NigeriaAir.FLIGHTS was only registered on 21 July 2018, three days after the announcement. Also, NigeriaAir.flights uses Nigeria’s WhoGoHost’s nameservers, suggesting that perhaps it was also registered by someone in Nigeria.