Jun 27, 2008 : The webhost industry: week review

📅 June 27, 2008 - A good portion of this week's Web hosting news came from on location at the Layered Technologies partner conference currently underway in Las Vegas. Anastasia Tubanos of WHIRtv has been posting reports from the event all week.


On Thursday, we reported that the conference had kicked off Wednesday night at the Ceaser's Palace hotel with a cocktail party event. Among the issues reported early in the event was the fact that Layered Technologies is apparently planning the official switch to the common abbreviation "Layered Tech."

Also on Thursday, we reported on the series of announcements we've seen from presenters and exhibitors at this and other upcoming events. Data protection software firm R1Soft said this week that it would be a "silver sponsor" at LTPact, and would host a Friday session on "The Future of Server Backup." Marketing company eBridge Marketing Solutions also said this week that it would be an exhibitor and a participant in a panel discussion at HostingCon 2008 in Chicago in late July.

Thursday evening, Anastasia recapped the day's events from LTPact in a blog post. Some of the highlights of the day's events included an opening address by Layered Tech CEO Jack Finlayson and a keynote presentation by Forrester Research principal analyst James Staten, who discussed cloud computing as a classic disruptive technology.

The more significant conference this week, from the broader Internet perspective, was the ICANN session taking place in Paris, which would see the regulatory body considering some significant issues of domain policy.

On Monday, we reported that ICANN would vote on the question of whether to allow the registration of domain names with a generally endless number of variations. According to the proposal, in early 2009, Internet users would be able to register domains with any extension they desired, instead of the regular .com or .net type top-level domain extensions.

And on Thursday, we reported that ICANN had given its approval for the new top-level domains, including multilingual ones. The typical domain extensions will be extended to include any string of letters, including Asian or Arabic characters and other scripts not included in the English alphabet.

While much of this week's news came from the conference, there was plenty consider from the outside world as well, in particular a couple of bad-news announcements about Google.

On Wednesday, we covered a report from "badware" researcher Stopbadware.org that identified the top countries and networks responsible for hosting things like spyware, malware and deceptive adware. The report identified Google as the fifth largest host, and the largest source outside China, which was identified as the country responsible for hosting roughly 50 percent of the world's badware. Stopbadware.org, which is sponsored in part by Google, attributed Google's role in hosting the material as being the result of the increasing use of its Blogger service to post links to malicious content.

Later in the week, we reported that Google had been sued for $1 billion by a software developer that claims the company stole its technology. Represented by Kelley Drye & Warren, a law firm known for having previously brought a case against Google related to its online advertising system, LimitNone claims that "misappropriated trade secrets and violated Illinois' consumer fraud laws," in building the Google Email Uploader. LimitNone says the application, which helps Outlook users to transition their emails, contacts and calendars to Gmail, is based closely on the look, feel and functionality of its gMove application.

This week's most significant news is also probably the news with the most potential to impact news in the weeks to come, and particularly in the long term. ICANN's approval of the new domain system would only begin to take effect in early 2009, but there is no doubt more public comment to come right away.