The African Union Commission (AUC) and 16 African countries have objected to an application submitted by Dot Connect Africa (DCA) for the .africa geographic Top Level Domain (gTLD) internet name.

South Africa’s Uniforum SA, trading as the ZA Central Registry, and Kenya’s DCA have applied to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to manage the .africa internet domain name.

Applications alone cost $185,000 each, while successful bidders could start managing the new gTLDs from 2013.

But drama has surrounded the two organisations competing for the .africa gTLD.

Last month, ICANN accepted a DCA request to change its application from being that of .dotafrica to .africa. In what appeared to be a misunderstanding, Sophia Bekele of DCA told ITWeb Africa that her organisation had intended to apply for .africa, hence the organisation’s use of ‘dotafrica’ in their application form.

Nevertheless, competition for the domain name has heated up following ICANN’s acceptance of DCA’s .africa application.

And the first objections to DCA’s application have arisen from the African Union and countries including the Comoros, Kenya, Cameroon, the DRC, Benin, Egypt, Gabon, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Morocco, Mali, Uganda, Senegal, South Africa, Nigeria and Tanzania.

These objections have been lodged with ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (GCA’s) early warning system. The GCA provides advice to ICANN on issues of public policy, and especially where there may be an interaction between ICANN's activities or policies and national laws or international agreements.

The AUC says that DCA has not met the requirements of the geographic status attributed with the .africa name, as applicants for this gLTD need the support of 60% of African governments.

“It is a geographic string application that does not have the requisite minimum support from African governments,” said the AUC.

The AUC went on further to to say that DCA’s application “constitutes an unwarranted intrusion and interference on the African Union Commission’s (AUC) mandate from African governments to establish the structures and modalities for the implementation of the dotAfrica (.Africa) project.”

Countries such as the Comoros added in their objections that Uniforum’s application has been endorsed by “39 individual African governments who have submitted letters of support per the Applicants' Guide Book”. DCA’s application, on the other hand, does not indicate that it has received this same support, say Comoros officials.

It is unclear as to whether more bodies could object either DCA or Uniforum ZA’s applications.

Also, an objection does not lead to an immediate withdrawal of an application.

“The GAC Early Warning is a notice only. It is not a formal objection, nor does it directly lead to a process that can result in rejection of the application,” says a note on the GAC objection letters.

“However, a GAC Early Warning should be taken seriously as it raises the likelihood that the application could be the subject of GAC Advice on New gTLDs or of a formal objection at a later stage in the process.”