Local firms promote their island on the internet

MORE local businesses are after local domain names to promote their Guernsey background, according to Nigel Roberts, the co-founder of Channelisles.net.

Channelisles.net, part of the Island Networks group, is the registry for web extensions .gg and .je and Mr Roberts said there had been a visible surge during the past couple of years from Guernsey companies eager to secure a .gg extension for their business, even in cases where they already had a .com or other extension.

'We currently have approximately 10,000 domain names under management across both Bailiwicks,' said Mr Roberts.

'It's definitely been noticeable lately that companies have been coming to us wanting to promote a local identity to the rest of the world.

'And what's more, they've actually been actively using them rather than just securing them to stop others taking them, which is great for us because that's why we started the company in the first place.'

Channelisles.net is based in Alderney and employs four people running the day-to-day administration of the .gg and .je domain names, while two more staff in South Africa help run the technical side.

Mr Roberts admits it has been a long journey since he and co-founder Laurie Brown, an IT consultant from Alderney, first viewed the potential of the internet.

It was he and Mr Brown who, at the dawn of the internet, took proposals to Jon Postel at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, then part of the University of South Carolina, that domain extensions .gg and .je should be the abbreviations used for Guernsey and Jersey respectively.