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ICANN, IAB Ask VeriSign to Suspend SiteFinder
dmehus writes "ICANN issued an advisory late today concerning VeriSign's controversial SiteFinder service. The advisory requests that VeriSign voluntarily suspend SiteFinder until various independent and objective reviews, which are now underway, have been completed. Interested parties should see the advisory for more details." I think most people here can agree it was a bad idea, although it's not generating revenue for most of us either. ICANN isn't alone here either. Nuclear Elephant writes "The Internet Architecture Board issued this response to an ICANN inquiry about Verisign's SiteFinder service."
I think the real solution is this: If Verisign wants to continue this practice then Verisign should have to pay to register each mis-typed domain. After all, the end effect of Verisign's Sitefinder is to dynamically create a domain if it isn't already registered. Making Verisign pay to register each of these mis-typed domains would most likely halt their practice. In my opinion, Verisign is now "domain squatting" on any domain that isn't registered.
Anyone else notice the lack of advanced notice that verisign gave ... well the world. I just can't immagine that they thought it through at all. If they wanted to do it you would think that they would have notified ICANN ahead of time or put up some sort of notice
We don't need no stinking sig!
Maybe if DNS were used correctly it wouldn't happen that way. DNS is supposed to be distributed. E.g. I contact my router [which runs a DNS server], my server contacts my ISP [which runs a cache] my ISP contacts ??? well it should contact it's providers cache and so on....
Also verisign makes it money by selling domain names. Recall that they used to be free at one point.
The DNS control is *entrusted* to Verisign. Versign doesn't own the internet and they could easily be replaced.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Screw up .COM and .NET and people care.
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
The difference is that virtually no one uses the .museum TLD. There have been complaints about the wildcards used for .cc, .nu and other TLDs. But it's only when they start playing games with .com and .net that people notice, because this affects everyone.
maybe because they're tired of running half of the DNS system for free?
Are you serious? You think God came down from High and forced Verisign to do this, as if Verisign doesn't have a choice? I don't get the "for free" part either.
Every time I send a message with a typo in the domain name, my message goes straight to Verisign's email servers. Though they are kind enough to send a bounce back to me, in the meantime they have the ability to
Shouldn't this be the main concern?
To foist a broken DNS on us in order to introduced a non-consensentual second revenue stream takes some gall. ICANN shouldn't be "asking Verisign" to suspend this, it should be taking actual action against them. I wonder what Jon Postel would say about it?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
IMHO, this should be left up to the browser software and not the DNS server..otherwise you end up with the same scenario with ISPs using it as an advertising gimmick. I believe MSIE performs a search on what you type in. I don't see why all browsers couldn't be outfitted to do something like this.
Remember, web browsers aren't the only thing that use BIND. You certainly don't want BIND suggesting possible matches to an SMTP server to deliver your private mail =). The solution would be best served at the client software end IMHO.
Indeed one can. At the browser level. Which is where this kind of stuff should be any way.
Something that seems to be mildly overlooked here, in my opinion, is that this has the power to give VeriSign "ownership" of the web in many users' minds.
If my mom tries to go to http://www.gooodhousekeeping.com and gets a VeriSign message and a search box, well it doesn't take much of that before she starts thinking that VeriSign == The WWW, because VeriSign is who always tells her what she typed wrong and where she should be going.
What this comes down to is a company trying to "brand" the web. In many ways, Google has been successful at this, but they have actually played fair and achieved what they have on the basis of merit. VeriSign is ABUSING their power to brand the web as their own.
It should be patently obvious by now that VeriSign 's modus operandi is one of deceit and trickery. Evidence the fake "renewal" cards they have sent out in the past to "slam" DNS registrants much like the shady phone companies have tried to do with your long-distance.
Damn, it's ridiculous that people even try to get away with this sort of crap these days...will someone with the power to please stop this?
-JT
A week ago I saw Verisign as a highly respectable registry and provider of all sorts of security products and verification. Then these recent events occur and their reputation in my mind has gone terribly sour.
Maybe it's just the bias I've learned from the Slashdot community, but they now just seem so imcompetent; maladroit? So much for the whole "trust" thing. I haven't given them my business in the past, but now it's looking significantly less likely. (Although they probably end up with some financial gain regardless of where I purchase domain names, correct?)
Now they just join the list of organisations that just leave a bad taste: SCO, RIAA, and now... VeriSign! (I'm sure there's many more.)
That's absurd, that means that Canadians are a race, Americans are a race which leads to an interesting notion of hyphenated races, where you have Asian-Americans, which are a race-race, and that's absolutely stupid.
The defininition of race requires that they be from the same stock, and sorry, that means that national populations don't qualify, because they're not all related.
Black and grey are both shades of white.
The real problem here is the fact that one-company is entrusted to run .com . TLDs should be replicated across mutually trusted servers in different companies. It is stupid to put all our eggs in one basket anyways. If we had at least three businesses replicating .com in their servers, and providing them as a public root server, then we could just kick out/ fine/ threaten rogue servers and our DNS queries would round robin to the other companies servers.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
When Verisign decided to assume control of the .com and .net registries at the time ICANN was formed (as they had done previously), they were making the conscious decision to do a certain number of DNS queries. It comes along with the job. Verisign gets a cut of all of the .com and .net domain registrations, and in return they provide certain DNS services as needed.
.com and .net registries.
It's not as though Verisign didn't know what they were getting into. They knew perfectly well, and I assure you that they are not strapped for cash or bandwidth. Even if they were, blatantly going around destroying the DNS system and violating commonly-held standards of conduct is not the way to do it. Not asking ICANN's opinion in the first place was also somewhat foolish, in my opinion. I would fully expect ICANN to release some sort of order or advisory telling Verisign to stop this practice or lose their contract to run the
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Among my other big problems with the whole thing, is the following line in their Terms of Use, section 10:
Sole Remedy.
Your use of the Verisign services is at your own risk. If you are dissatisfied with any of the materials, results or other contents of the Verisign services or with these terms and conditions, our privacy statement, or other policies, YOUR SOLE REMEDY IS TO DISCONTINUE USE OF THE VERISIGN SERVICES OR OUR SITE.
Great.. and exactly HOW do *I* as the defined "user" do that?!
When did I consent to verisign that I wanted to use their free service? and how would I tell them I don't WANT to use it?
Anybody?!
> > Also verisign makes it money by selling domain names. Recall that they used to
/year.
> > be free at one point.
> Assuming you're young enough to buy into a theory calling government services
> "free."
Why assume that?
Its free as in $0
When you were done with a domain, you sent in a form to deactivate it. Same form you sent in to register it in the first place.
I cant remember when this change over happened exactly, but it was the early 90's.
(I want to say 1993 but my memory is very shaky there.. shouldnt be hard to look up if you care)
Then they started charging $50/year until the late 90's when they lowered that price to $35/year.
They also for the longest time, starting when they first charged money for domains, that a domain must be paid for atleast for 2 years.
I think NetSol may still do this (I havent used them in forever)
It was the alternate registration services that first started allowing 1 year registrations.
Oh by the way. All of this was from InterNIC, who was appointed after the ArpaNet became the Internet, so it had very little (Read: none at all) to do with a government service at this point.
Even the government service on arpanet before DNS was free.
You simply emailed the guys with the master internet-hosts file.
They add your records (host to IP)
Then you wait about a week for everyone on the internet to download the new file and update their machines with it (Yes it was a totally manual process)
I don't know why I didn't think of Google as well; they have demonstrated solid ethics and good sense, and I think could be counted on to act as a balance against a member with less mind to the common good. And they've already got a proven fault-tolerant system in place (what with how prolific pigeons are ;)
I *did* think of Microsoft, tho given their past behaviour, I have mixed feelings about that. They do have the monetary resources; however, they don't seem willing to use their own server infrastructure for anything they can farm out (they contract out even piddly crap like their subscriber mailing lists and event signups, which are hardly CPU- or bandwidth-intensive), or maybe it's not competent to support that much load, I dunno.
Big backbones would indeed be another logical place to put it. Might this also speed up response time?
Major ISPs might be considered (mainly AOL and Earthlink as the two biggies), but given that they seem to have enough trouble with their own internal maintenance, I'm not sure that's such a good idea.
Another reason big corps like IBM might work well, is that they have a vested interest in making sure their servers are up ALL the time (downtime is lost money!)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?