August 23, 2011 — Web hosting control panel developer cPanel announced on Thursday that it has named Ben Fisher director of marketing. Fisher is the first person to fill this role, according to the press release. Fisher owns TheHostingNews.com, where he is responsible for marketing and business development for the news website as well.

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 .

July 22, 2011 — Web hosting provider ZNet announced on Friday that it is now an authorized reseller of the Google Apps suite of communication and collaboration tools. This news comes a week after ZNet announced it now offers SmarterTools products to its customers.

The recently registered domain names sunonsunday.co.uk and thesunonsunday.co.uk have been transferred to News International reports The Guardian following speculation about who registered them after the controversial closure of Britain’s largest selling Sunday newspaper News of the World. Mired in phone hacking allegations of murdered teenager Millie Dowler by people acting on behalf of the NotW and attempting to wrest control of the 60 per cent of BSkyB it does not own, News International decided to close the newspaper to deflect some of the problems. The domain names were registered on behalf of an unnamed registrant “the day after the Guardian revealed that a private detective acting for the News of the World hacked into the murdered teenager Milly Dowler’s voicemail, but before News International announced that it was to close the paper after 168 years when advertisers and politicians turned against it.” The Guardian also reports that News has not taken control of all the relevant domains having not “so far acquired control of what could be seen as a related domain, Sunonsunday.com, which was created much earlier, in September 2007, and is owned by Marco Milani, the bassist in the group Sun on Sunday. Thesunonsunday.com is owned by an unnamed British individual, and was also registered on 5 July.”

After a relatively modest increase in new registrations in 2009 at the height of the global financial crisis, new .BE registrations rebounded strongly in 2010 with another record in the number of new registrations according to the 2010 annual report. There were more than 257,000 new .BE registrations in 2010, almost ten per cent better than in the previous year. Renewal numbers were also very good in 2010 with an 83 per cent renewal rate of existing .BE domain names, ranking in the top five globally. The growth in active domain names was nearly 13 per cent in 2010, meaning that 2010 was the year in which the magic mark of 1,000,000 domain names was passed. At the end of June 2011 there were 1,156,953 .BE domains registered. DNS.be also did some research into why .BE domain names are registered. The findings were broadly similar to previous years with over three quarters (77%, 77.7% in 2009) of registrants linking an email address to the domain and a website in 84.3% of cases (82.3% in 2009). The registry found that only 12.2 per cent of registrations are defensive (and hence is not linked to either an email address or a website) compared to 12.4 per cent in 2009. In recent years DNS.be have seen a fall in that percentage. The registry considers this a positive change because it means a larger number of domain names are being used more actively. Most registrants have only one domain name registered, with over three quarters (435,794 – 78%) of registrants having just one domain name. 64,868 (12%) registrants registered two domain names while the average registrant has 1.96 domain names. In other news in 2010, security was increased with a new procedure was introduced in July 2010 that ensures tighter checks are made on all new registrations. This will result in higher quality of whois data. At the same time, these new checks make it more difficult for fraud and other illicit practices to gain a foothold. Greater security in the .BE zone is also a particular focus in the registry’s objectives for 2011. For 2011, one of the key developments will be the replacement of all of the hardware on the registration platform, including a number of network connections. This will enhance the performance and availability of the platform. It will also mean an optimisation of costs for DNS.be over time. DNS.be are integrating some of their name servers as part of anycast clouds, while a number of European locations will receive new equipment. The DNS.be 2010 Annual Report contains a lot more statistics and information on .BE domain names. To download the report in full, see www.dns.be/pdf/Annual_Report_en_2010.pdf . To register your .BE domain name, check out Europe Registry here .

An image of the notice posted in place of the shut-down Poker sites as of publishing (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — As has been extensively reported over the weekend, the US government shut down three of the world’s largest online poker sites, in a massive case alleging billions of dollars in money laundering and bank fraud. According to several reports appearing over the weekend, payment processing firms involved in the transactions may have been involved in helping federal prosecutors build their case

An image of the notice posted in place of the shut-down Poker sites as of publishing (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — As has been extensively reported over the weekend, the US government shut down three of the world’s largest online poker sites, in a massive case alleging billions of dollars in money laundering and bank fraud. According to several reports appearing over the weekend, payment processing firms involved in the transactions may have been involved in helping federal prosecutors build their case. Over the weekend, it was widely reported that the websites of Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and Absolute Poker, three of the largest online poker sites, had been seized by the US Department of Justice, along with bank accounts (74 of them, in 14 countries) belonging to the companies and their founders