VeriSign Sued Over SiteFinder Service

dmehus writes "It was only a matter of time, the pundits said, and they were right. Popular Enterprises, LLC., an Orlando, Florida based cybersquatting so-called 'search services' company, has filed a lawsuit in Orlando federal court against VeriSign, Inc. over VeriSign's controversial SiteFinder 'service.' While PopularEnterprises has had a dodgy history of buying up thousands of expired domain names and redirecting them to its Netster.com commercial "search services" site, the lawsuit is most likely a good thing, as it provides one more avenue to pursue in getting VeriSign to terminate SiteFinder. According to the lawsuit, the company contends alleges antitrust violations, unfair competition and violations of the Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. It asks the court to order VeriSign to put a halt to the service. VeriSign spokesperson Brian O'Shaughnessy said the company has not yet seen the lawsuit and that it doesn't comment on pending litigation."

Comments

Nice tactic.

[NightSpots]

Anti-trust was one of the very few tactics I didn't hear discussed as possible ways to stop Verisign.

Arguing that they get for free what other companies must pay for is probably one of the easier arguments for win, since it proves itself nearly by definition.

I applaud the jackass who pays to abuse typos. At least they've finally proven their worth.

Re:Nice tactic.

[nocomment]

Don't forget the petition!!! Go sign it.

http://www.petitiononline.com/icanndns/

Most ISPs have blocked it

[Amsterdam Vallon]

*Confirmed*: Adelphia has blocked VeriSign's new "service."

Please reply to this and list names of fellow anti-VeriSign ISPs if your ISP has blocked this new "feature" as well.

Thanks! I will enjoy analyzing this data.

Re:Most ISPs have blocked it

[shostiru]

We (mid-sized midwestern ISP) had our main nameservers (tinydns and djbdns) patched by 2AM the night this mess started, using the patches we found here. By a few hours later, I'd kludged the BIND source myself on a couple of other machines to return NXDOMAIN for anything in all three of the /24 netblocks in AS30060 (it worked fine, at least until the ISC patch was released). AFAIK our customers never even noticed the wildcarding.

If you work in an ISP or other network infrastructure company, you know first-hand the degree of astonishment and rage that Verisign's move elicited; the fallout (spam filtration, security, network monitoring, etc.) goes far beyond HTTP. I don't think any of us slept much that night ... it only took a few hours to restore normal DNS behaviour, the remaining ten or so I spent in shock with my jaw scraping the floor.

I've dealt with Verisign before (try getting decent documentation on the cybercash application library!) and knew they were greedy and stupid, but I wasn't counting on raw, unfettered eeeeeevil.

Re:Most ISPs have blocked it

[jms]

Speakeasy appears to have blocked the "feature".

and the IEFT now has an Internet-Draft

[shostiru]

which I just found, draft-main-typo-wcard-02. Worth a look, as is the IETF mailing list archive. They're definitely aware of the problem. I particularly like following paragraph from the Internet-Draft:

An error response that only works correctly in one situation would be as bad as an SMTP server that ignored its input and always produced a fixed sequence of responses: it would work in the one situation it was designed to expect, but cause chaos whenever presented with any other situation.

sounds like the Snubby Mail Rejector, hmm?

Re:I've never understood

[marphod]

How is it different from the pioneers getting 40 acres and a mule?

First, a history lesson. '40 Acres and a Mule' wasn't a pioneer issue. What it is true that during the western rushes, various federal lands were put up for auction or claim by pioneers. The lands were not, however, specified to be 40 acres, but varied in size based on the territory and the specific land grant. For that matter, according to one of my HS Social Studies teachers (a dozen years ago), there were still federal lands for claim in parts of Alaska. That teacher was known to embellish the truth, so I won't put any varacity statement with that.

'40 acres and a mule' were reparations for slaves in the south. They were instituted by a Northern (Union) general, during the aftermath of the civil war, and were later reveresed by an presidential executive order.

So, in short, your parellel falls a little short. If the ICANN were to pass a ruling granting johnny-come-latelies names from vast corporate pools, that would be comprable.

So, what's wrong with cybersquatting: Well, with the federal land grants, if you occupied and developed the federal lands for a specified period of time, they became yours. You could sell or otherwise use them as you wished. Here, cybersqquatters either are taking a developed item (debatably property) and using its good will and value for an interest contrary to the orginal owners. Which would be a violation of the land grants, so thats one point where your analogy fails.

The other type of cybersquatter (who speculates on names or misspellings) is also abusing the good will of the originator, but may be a valid comparison. It is, however, annoying, to get redirected away from what you wanted because of a typo, and from the other side, a squatter who is taking an otherwise useful resource and making it near-useless is neither providing a valid service or generating good will.

Don't badmouth Netster too bad

[Tyler Eaves]

Yes, it's semi-sleazy, but they don't cybersquat.

Timeline:

1997 or so: I registered tylereaves.com, mainly for use in e-mail

2000: I let the domain lapse, not really using it, and tired of paying $40 a year or so for it (Hey, registering was expensive in '97!)

200?: Netster becomes the owner of tylereaves.com

2003: I nicely ask for it back.
2003: I get my domain back. They didn't even charge me the trasnfer fees.

Technical defense against hijacked domains

[ODBOL]

This is a good time to look at Bob Frankston's dotDNS proposal for a layer of reliable but meaningless domain names. dotDNS lookups can be made self-verifiable using public-key signatures, but without the costly chain of trust required by DNSSEC methods. The validity of a dotDNS binding can be verified easily by the querier, without relying at all on the server that provided the putative binding.

dotDNS does not solve the whole problem, since any layer that translates from humanly meaningful names to dotDNS names is still vulnerable to hijacking. But the reliable and verifiable name bindings in dotDNS will make it *much* easier to switch name-resolution services when we are dissatisfied with their policies.

dotDNS is a cheap and immediately deployable positive step toward fixing the DNS mess, requiring no approval by any central agency. It's time for a visionary sponsor to step forward and just do it.

Owning a domain you don't use

[Animats]

Owning a domain that wasn't in DNS used to be called a "lame delegation". At one time, about a decade ago, it was considered reasonable to garbage-collect domains that were lame delegations, but that was back before the Internet went commercial. Now you can have all the lame delegations you want.

But why? There's no real market in domain names any more. Verisign tried to make one. GreatDomains used to have thousands of listings, and you'd see things like "Asked: $25,000. Bid: $20." Now Verisign only has "premium domains" on GreatDomains, ones like "record.com". There are only 66 domains for sale, and few sales.

Re:Null space needs to remain null

[kfg]

"It makes me wonder if someone has a patent on silence yet?"

No, there's too much prior art, but John Cage has a copyright on 4'33" of it.

KFG

how to complain about Verisign to ICANN

[chongo]

In addition to signing the:

online petition

you can file a complaint about Verisign to ICANN by using their:

Registrar Problem Report Form