Wired News: Afghan Internet Domain Launches

KABUL, Afghanistan -- "Planting its flag in cyberspace," Afghanistan will officially activate its .af Internet domain name on Monday for Afghan e-mail addresses and Web sites, officials and the United Nations said.


The effort, a joint collaboration between the U.N. Development Program and the Afghan Ministry of Communications, marks a giant technological leap for a country where the Internet was banned for years during the former Taliban regime. But it is likely to be a long time before the average, impoverished Afghan citizen will be able to afford to explore the new possibilities.[...]


So far, just two websites have been registered under the .af domain, one belonging to the Ministry of Communications, the other to UNDP. As of Sunday, the ministry site was still "under construction."


Despite the Internet's spread around the world in the last decade, it remains a rarity in Afghanistan, which is still struggling to recover from more than two decades of near-continuous warfare.


A handful of Internet cafes have sprung up in the war-battered capital, Kabul, since last summer, but online time is too expensive for the average citizen, who typically earns less than a dollar a day.