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In
a letter
we
received this afternoon, the Association
of National Advertisers (ANA),
who represents dozens of well-known global
brands including AT&T, eBay,
IBM, Intel and Microsoft,
to name just a few (see the full
membership list here), blasted
ICANN over "woefully
inadequate" preparations for the
impending roll out of new gTLDs. |
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The
letter said, "Name
Collision is a major concern
for global brands and consumers as ICANN
prepares to roll out more than 1,000 new web
site suffixes or top level domains (such as
.hotel, .buy and .bank). ICANN’s preparations
for this deployment have been woefully
inadequate." ANA
noted that the organization has long expressed
concerns about what it called "ICANN’s
rush to deploy these domains."
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The
letter noted, "ICANN
itself has recently raised red flags
that it may not fully know the true
ramifications of a roll-out of new
TLDs by stating that as many as 20%
of all of the proposed TLDs present a large
potential risk for name collision.
A recent third-party
report commissioned by ICANN
admits that the chance of clashes is significantly
larger than ICANN initially suggested. The
report readily admits that the data only
counted the number (and not the types) of
potential name clashes, which means ICANN
has virtually no data to determine
whether delegating new TLDs could |
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interrupt
important public safety communications,
government web traffic, e-commerce
applications, internal corporate
communications or just casual web traffic." |
On
Tuesday (August 27), ANA sent a letter
to ICANN strongly expressing its concerns and
the organization said its member companies are
working to determine if clash issues are present
within their networks. Today's letter added,
"These issues are highly technical,
complex, and they will take more time than
ICANN has allowed for a thorough assessment.
It is extremely disappointing that ICANN is
forcing companies to rush to conduct this
analysis when ICANN has been aware of clash
issues since 2009."
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The
ANA letter concluded, "ICANN’s
failure to determine adequately the
extent of the problem means that many
companies are only now learning about
these clash issues on the eve of the
planned new TLD deployment. ANA is
calling on ICANN to fulfill its mission to
maintain Internet security and stability
in the public interest and postpone the
rollout until the full extent of name
collisions can be determined." ICANN
has not yet publicly responded to the
letter's claims. |
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