The Interactive Advertising Bureau proved that they too are asleep at the wheel belatedly complaining to ICANN about its plan for new generic Top Level Domains, saying that the programme to assign hundreds of thousands of new domain names would cause incalculable financial damage to brand owners, including the hundreds of media brands in its membership. The complaint coming after the ICANN board approved its Applicant Guidebook in June at the Singapore meeting, also comes after America’s Association of National Advertisers woke up and complained about new gTLDs last week. While it subsequently came out that the ANA had complained about the new gTLD programme back in 2008, something the organisation seems to have forgotten in its complaints to ICANN, one has to wonder what they have been doing to more or less ignore the proposal for so long. “ICANN’s potentially momentous change seems to have been made in a top-down star chamber. There appears to have been no economic impact research, no full and open stakeholder discussions, and little concern for the delicate balance of the Internet ecosystem,” said Randall Rothenberg, CEO and President, IAB. “This could be disastrous for the media brand owners we represent and the brand owners with which they work. We hope that ICANN will reconsider both this ill-considered decision and the process by which it was reached.” The IAB is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies who are responsible for selling 86 per cent of online advertising in the United States.
