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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.
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.
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.
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.)
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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