South African internet users lodged about 685 take-down notices with the Internet Service Providers’ Association last year, and close to two-thirds were turned away. The most common reason was not that a complaint lacked merit. It was that the content sat outside South Africa’s jurisdiction.
ISPA, the ZA Registry Consortium (ZARC) and the .za Domain Name Authority (ZADNA) said on 18 September 2026 that a specific remedy exists for each type of fraud involving a .za domain name, and pointed users to a joint public advisory setting out how to pursue them.
“Ongoing collaboration between SA’s Internet Service Provider (ISP) sector and local domain organisations means there are remedies available for each type of .za domain name fraud,” said Ant Brooks, ISPA spokesman.
Four routes, depending on where the fraud sits
The first is the take-down notice, which applies to a website hosted in South Africa whether or not it carries a .za address. The Electronic Communications and Transactions Act of 2002 created the process, and the communications minister has recognised ISPA as an industry representative body for its purposes. A complainant who cannot identify the host may name it as unknown and let ISPA trace it.
The notice removes content only: it cannot deactivate a domain, and it cannot compel anyone to reveal who was behind the site.
The second route runs through ZARC, the registry operator for .co.za, .org.za, .web.za and .net.za. It covers a .za domain used for fraud with no website attached, a domain sending scam email for instance, and a .za website hosted abroad and therefore out of ISPA’s reach.
ZARC’s anti-abuse policy names phishing, pharming, fraudulent websites, malware distribution, botnet command and control, spam and illegal network access. It does not address ownership disputes, trademark complaints, or a site’s content.
The third is for impersonation, where someone registers a near-copy of a company’s domain. ZADNA’s alternative dispute resolution process starts with informal mediation and moves to a formal ruling by one of two accredited providers, the South African Institute of Intellectual Property Law or the Arbitration Foundation of Southern Africa, if the parties fail to settle within five days. Unlike the first two routes, it carries a fee, though ZADNA may help complainants who cannot pay.
Everything else falls to the police. The advisory tells victims to take a sworn affidavit to a station, ask for the matter to be referred to the cybercrime division, obtain a case number, then chase it, and notify the National Cybersecurity Hub.
Where the remedies stop
ISPA’s own published statistics show how narrow the local remedy is. Of roughly 685 notices lodged in 2025, about 220 were accepted and about 435 rejected, and close to 320 of those rejections were refused because the target fell outside South African jurisdiction.
Volumes have moved little since 2020, ranging between about 600 and 760 notices a year.
The notices that succeed are also not mostly about fraud. Intellectual property accounted for about 115 of the accepted notices in 2025 and security issues for about 77, the pattern for most of the past decade.
A renewed push rather than a new document
The advisory ISPA, ZARC and ZADNA are promoting is version 2.0, published in January 2026, so this is a fresh push behind an existing document. Its opening figures are older: 50.84 million internet users as at January 2024, 78.9% of households with at least one person online, and a daily usage figure drawn from a 2019 report.
Those routes also sit in a legal framework ISPA itself has argued is incomplete. The association told the regulator in July 2026 that internet blocking in South Africa needs a clear statutory basis rather than the patchwork of court orders and voluntary action that now governs it.
ISPA concludes that businesses should keep their sites and domains in South Africa. “Locally-hosted sites and local domain names are more trustworthy because South Africa has processes in place to combat fraud happening within our jurisdiction,” Brooks said. Its members sell that hosting, but the rejection data makes the same case: the remedies are real, and they end at the border.
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