November 12, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Many of the most interesting trends in this week's Web hosting industry news had to do with services directly related to Web hosting, as important developments came in the areas of email security and domain registration.

One of two notable domain-related trends this week was the further development of the practice, gaining in popularity among Web hosts, of offering domain registration at a loss as a means of generating leads for Web hosting sales.

On Monday, Internet researcher Netcraft reported that Web hosting provider Interland's recent move to drop its price for a year-long domain registration to $7.95 had caused a gain of 132,147 new sites gained by the company. The surge snapped a long period of slow growth for Interland, which had been trailing competing companies in new signups for several months.

On Thursday, Web hosting provider Avantex announced that it had reduced its pricing for .com, .net and .org to $5.99 per year, one of the lowest prices for domain registration in the business. The company joins a growing list of hosting providers offering domain registration at reduced rates, including 1&1 Internet, EV1 Servers and Hostway.

While rates for domain registration continued to drop, this week also saw some more legislative domain news, as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers introduced new transfer rules, and finalized a deal to authorize a new sponsored top-level domain.

On Wednesday, it was reported that ICANN had introduced new transfer rules that would allow for the transfer of domains within five days unless the domain's owner specifically denied the request, basically making a non-response the equivalent of a ?yes." According to Netcraft, the new rules could make it much easier to hijack the domain names of owners who do not closely monitor their records. At particularly risk are domain name owners with out-of-date whois data or contact information. The new policy goes into effect Friday, November 12.

And on Thursday, the National Arbitration Forum and the Asian Domain Name Dispute Resolution Centre announced that they had been approved as independent dispute resolution providers for ICANN's Transfer Dispute Resolution Policy. The groups will handle disputes and appeals between registrars over alleged violations of the transfer policy.

While ICANN was handing down new legislation, email security firms were announcing their support for new standards this week.

On Wednesday, the Anti-Phishing Working Group announced its support for a global email authentication strategy to initiate the development of technologies for IP validation and digital signatures for message authentication designed to stop spam and phishing attacks. APWG was one of 34 organizations to sign a plan delivered to the Federal Trade Commission by Microsoft and TRUSTe.

And on Thursday, network hardware maker Cisco announced that the Cisco Identified Internet Mail specification was among the technologies promoted by the letter submitted to the FTC. Cisco said it had submitted an upated version of its Identified Internet Mail proposal to the FTC in October, and released an open-source implementation of the proposal, designed to enable the developer community to easily distribute advances in the technology.

While only a few of these announcements directly involved Web hosting companies, each of them has an obvious impact on the ongoing operation of the Web hosting business, as domain name registration and email security have become obviously essential elements of the Web hosting package.