The World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (WTISD) is commemorated globally on the 17th May of every year. The day of 17 May marks the anniversary of the signing of the first International Telegraph Convention and the creation of the International Telecommunication Union. It has been celebrated annually on 17 May since 1969, marking the founding of ITU and the signing of the first International Telegraph Convention in 1865.
The purpose of World Telecommunication and Information Society Day is to help raise awareness of the possibilities that the use of the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICT) can bring to societies and economies, as well as of ways to bridge the digital divide.
The Lesotho Communications Authority, which is a national regulatory agency for the Kingdom of Lesotho for communications services decided to commemorate the day by promoting the Lesotho country code top-level domain (ccTLD) which is .ls (dot.LS). ccTLD is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. For Lesotho it is .ls, and it was first established and delegated in 1993 to the National University of Lesotho.
In 2012, the Communications Act (No. 4 of 2012) section 5 (1) brought about changes. It provides that: “the Authority shall, in relation to the communications sector, have power to designate an entity to administer Internet domain names”. In line with the Act, in 2016 the LCA established LsNIC to manage .ls ccTLD.
The roles of LsNIC include among others:
• Administration and management of .ls domain namespace and compliance with the international best practices on administration.
• License and regulate registrars.
• Develop and publish guidelines on the procedures for domain name registrations.
• Enhance public awareness on the economic and commercial benefits of domain name registration.
• May and must, when requested by the minister, make recommendations in relation to policy on any matter relating to .ls domain name space.
The technical and administrative management of the .ls domain are now done by LsNIC.
Members of the public and local institutions are encouraged to register individual, commercial and institutional domains and this could be done using a network of accredited registrars and these registrars are available on the LsNIC website which is: www.nic.ls.