One must wonder what America’s Association of National Advertisers has been doing for the last five years or so. As ICANN has been consulting about the introduction of new generic Top Level Domains, they have seemingly said nothing. Not a peep. Well, not until July this year anyway. And then it becomes a flood. And now a letter to ICANN’s CEO and President Rod Beckstrom where the ANA criticises ICANN for its lack of a bottom-up input process involving the global Internet community, insufficient research and guidance from expert authorities, inadequate oversight by the U.S. Department of Commerce and potentially disastrous consequences if the program is implemented in January 2012, as planned. While ICANN’s process has not been without criticism, it’s difficult to take seriously the ANA’s comments. I mean, what were all those ICANN meetings, the long drawn out process that has gone close to pushing to the limit some of the early parties interested in new gTLDs. The ANA argues that implementation of the ICANN program is economically unsupportable and is likely to cause irreparable harm and damage to its membership and the Internet business community in general. At the same time, according to the ANA, the program contravenes the legal rights of brand owners and jeopardises the safety of consumers. “By introducing confusion into the marketplace and increasing the likelihood of cybersquatting and other malicious conduct, the ICANN top-level domain program diminishes the power of trademarks to serve as strong, accurate and reliable symbols of source and quality in the marketplace,” says Bob Liodice, President and CEO, ANA. “Brand confusion, dilution and other abuses also pose risks of cyber predator harms, consumer privacy violations, identity theft and cyber security breaches. The decision to go forward with the program also violates sound public policy and contravenes ICANN’s Code of Conduct and its undertakings with the United States Department of Commerce.” So OK, the ANA raises some points, but points that have been debated interminably. And where was the ANA? Apparently not at the meetings and now they have woken up and demand the process be stopped. Give me a break. The ANA is a professional organisation that, so they say has more than 400 companies as members, representing in excess of 10,000 brands that collectively spend over $250 billion in marketing, communications and advertising each year, presumably in the US. So with all these members and all this support, why have they only now woken up to the new gTLD process? To read more of the ANA’s criticisms and a link to their letter, see the news release on their website at www.ana.net/content/show/id/21790 .

Nominet have introduced a free pilot DNSSEC Signing Service to simplify the signing of zones and help encourage the introduction of the improved security measure in the .UK ccTLD. This new product from Nominet allows registrars to hand-over the process of DNSSEC signing their zones to Nominet. The service reduces the technical barriers to DNSSEC deployment by registrars. It allows registrars to quickly and easily start offering DNSSEC as a security product to their customers with very few overheads and without significant and costly infrastructure development. Nominet’s signing service is an alternative approach to DNSSEC management that, with a much lower infrastructure investment, allows registrars to sign zones. Nominet will generate and manage DNSSEC keys and DS records and publish them to nameservers and parent zones respectively, allowing registrars to sign zones in a quick and simple way. The pilot service is free however Nominet say they intend to introduce charges for using the service in January 2013. The fee will be ten per cent of the registration cost which, based on the current registration prices will be £0.50 (plus VAT) per domain name for two years. Nominet have provided information on how the DNSSEC Signing Service works here . To register your .UK domain name, check out Europe Registry here .

The number of Chinese websites dropped by 401 per cent in 2010 to 1.91 million websites according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The dramatic drop was attributed to stronger regulation. “Although the Internet is posing some problems for new media, our regulation is becoming stronger, we have taken a very big step in this area,” CASS media expert Liu Ruisheng was quoted as saying on the organisation’s website reports AFP. But while the number of websites dropped, Liu said Chinese webpages increased in 2010 by 60 billion, an increase of 78.6 percent over 2009 the AFP report continued. “This means our content is getting stronger, while our supervision is getting more strict and more regulated,” he said. The drop in the number of websites corresponds from the decline in .CN domain name registrations. Registrations of .CN domain names plummeted to 3,379,441 active domain names as of 28 February, a decline of over ten million registrations in 14 months, according to statistics published by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) now not available from their website. The total number of registered domain names declined from a peak of 13,459,133 as of 31 December 2009 when .CN was the number one ccTLD (CNNIC previously published registration statistics dated the end of each month). The decline has meant .CN, which was easily the number one ccTLD at its peak is now at best fifth and probably sixth in terms of total registrations. The dramatic reductions are the result of the end of promotions that lasted for much of 2008 and 2009 where domain names could be registered for a few cents and the introduction of restrictions on registrants. The restrictions on registrants were monitored by 600 temporary workers that were hired in February 2011 to check all .CN domain names for pornographic content and inaccurate records according to an IDG report at the time.

In 2010 ICANN commissioned a study from DNS-OARC to examine the impact of DNSSEC deployment in the root zone , and in particular the effects on clients from the large DNS responses resulting from the use of a Deliberately Unvalidatable Root Zone (DURZ). The DNS-OARC study drew upon the results of a coordinated data collection exercise by root server operators , with each data collection window timed to coincide with a transition by one or more root servers [TXT, 28 KB] from serving an unsigned root zone to serving the DURZ

Paul van Brouwershaven, CTO of Networking4All How to Become Owner of Facebook.com for Less Than 10 Dollars with Networking4All (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) – In the first keynote presentation of day two of WorldHostingDays 2011, CTO Paul van Brouwershaven of security provider Networking4All ( www.networking4all.com ) gave attendees a basic guide on how companies ought to approach selecting the right domain name for registration. Titled “How to Become Owner of Facebook.com for Less Than 10 Dollars”, Brouwershaven began his presentation by looking at the history behind the domain name registration of Facebook.

Markus Kluge, VP of Janolaw’s online department (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In the second session of the afternoon at Europa-Park’s Petit Paris, Markus Kluge, VP of Janolaw’s ( www.janolaw.de ) online department discussed the “Legal facts and misbelieves in cross border e-commerce transactions”. In this presentation, Kluge expanded on the introduction to legal issues of cross border transactions in the European Union he offered this morning as part of ePages CEO Wilfried Beeck’s presentation.

Roland Sars, BackupAgent director of sales and marketing (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In the first session of the afternoon held at Europa-Park’s Magic Cinema, Roland Sars, BackupAgent ( www.backupagent.com ) director of sales and marketing discussed the importance of backup and storage solutions. Titled “The Cloud backup opportunity”, the presentation kicked off with a brief background on BackupAgent. He also highlighted the evolution of hosting providers into cloud service providers.