SWITCH, the registry for .CH and .LI domain names, enabled DNSSEC on day two of the annual Domain Pulse conference in Luzern yesterday. SWITCH became the third ccTLD registry to enable DNSSEC giving registrants of .CH domain names added security following .SE (Sweden) and .CZ (Czech Republic).

The added security for internet users allows for a more secure internet, especially important for banks and other financial services providers, for example.

At the Domain Pulse conference, Urs Eppenberger of SWITCH and Marc Furrer of the Swiss Federal Communications Commission (ComCom) enabled DNSSEC.

Furrer said he was very pleased with the efforts of SWITCH to be playing a leading role in the implementation of more secure internet communications and commerce.

“I am particularly proud of the fact that Switzerland is one of the first countries in Europe to introduce DNSSEC. This now guarantees security in the internet” said a delighted Marc Furrer, President of ComCom, in a statement.

Meanwhile DENIC is on schedule to prepare a test bed for registrars and this phase will run until 2011, said Sabine Dolderer, the company’s CEO.

However nic.at will not be introducing DNSSEC in 2010, said Richard Wein, CEO of nic.at. Wein believes there is not yet the demand or the market for it in Austria (.AT) at the moment, but like DENIC, nic.at will be watching developments closely in the .CH ccTLD closely. Nic.at will be preparing for DNSSEC internally to have it ready for deployment when there is a demand.

Nic.at is also preparing an innovative business model to allow internet companies from registries, and in particular those planning to apply for new generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), registrars, banks and others demanding a high level of security, to use their infrastructure. It is planned to have this finalised in the summer of 2010.

Among other presentations included Steve Gobin from ICANN who spoke of the new Registrar Accreditation Agreement while Simon Kopp of Kantonspolizei Luzern spoke about Fit4Chat website, an initiative of the Luzern canton’s police department to help parents and children deal with unwanted contact from strangers, and in particular older adults, online.

There was also a presentation on internationalised domain names (IDNs) from Leonid Todorov from the Coordination Centre for TLD RU who explained the difficulties for Russian users in having to use only Latin characters for domain names. With a very small number of English speakers, especially in the more remote regions, and no adequate Latin/Cyrllic script translation, particularly relating to international trademarks, the introduction of IDNs will be of huge benefit to internet users in the country.

The 2011 Domain Pulse conference will be held in Vienna, Austria, from 17 to 18 February which will more or less coincide with the predicted one millionth .AT domain registration milestone.

Videos and slides of all presentations, mostly in German, are available on the Domain Pulse website at Domain Pulse conference website although without simultaneous translations as occurred during the meeting.