Urgent-Act Today- Join Ukita and CIF in saving .cloud

Urgent - You need to act today if you want to help keep .cloud open to all.Deadline is tomorrow to register your objection to a proposal to ......

The UK IT Association (UKITA) are joining with its  strategic alliance  partner the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) to try to prevent new Top Level Domains (TLD’s) becoming closed registered owner and controlled by large multi-national companies.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is in the process of expanding the top-level domain name space by adding over a thousand new TLDs and a number of large corporations have lodged bids to own generic TLD’s (rather than specific brand names that we would have no issue with) and thereby gain control over domains such as .cloud and .book. This is an area of particular concern to UKITA members who are cloud professionals.

The founding principle of the internet is openness and freedom. The current TLD’s are fast becoming insufficient with the success of the internet leading to new domains being created all of the time. At present anybody can purchase the rights to use a TLD, such as .com or .co.uk, provided nobody else is using it.

UKITA represents the interests of  the SME sector of the IT industry in the UK.  Andrew Corbett, Development Director of the UK IT Association, had this to say, “a monopoly of the .CLOUD domain risks creating an unfair marketplace in which all other cloud providers are deemed inferior or less likely to be found if people select vendors with the appearance of specific relevance by the form of the TLD.”

Not only would it harm SMEs (and anybody else they chose to exclude), but it would also go against ICAAN's own commitment to “promote competition, consumer trust, and consumer choice”.

Join us in raising objectionsdirectly on the ICANN website before the end of today (6th March 2013) :http://www.icann.org/en/news/public-comment/closed-generic-05feb13-en.htm

Read a more detailed blog about the issue by Andy Burton, Chairman of the Cloud Industry Forum by clicking here.