Eight out of every ten websites using a .ng domain are hosted on servers outside Nigeria. That single statistic, shared by industry experts, cuts to the heart of a tension the country has not yet resolved: Nigeria wants to lead Africa's digital economy, but the infrastructure holding its own internet presence together sits largely on foreign soil.
The concern goes beyond national pride. When .ng domains are hosted abroad, Nigeria loses control over its own data, becomes vulnerable to outages and policy decisions made in other jurisdictions, and misses the economic activity that local hosting would generate. For a country that has invested heavily in positioning itself as a tech hub, the gap between ambition and ground reality is difficult to ignore.
Experts in the industry are pointing to this dependence as one of the more urgent conversations Nigeria's digital sector needs to have. Building out local hosting infrastructure, incentivising businesses to keep their data onshore, and strengthening the policy environment around data sovereignty are all part of what that conversation looks like in practice.
The .ng domain was always meant to signal a distinctly Nigerian presence on the internet. Right now, for most of those domains, the signal points somewhere else entirely.
Originally published by BusinessDay.