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."

Comments

Versign should have to pay to register domain.

[Proudrooster]

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.

Re:So who gets the money ?

[tomstdenis]

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

Re:So who gets the money ?

[twistedcubic]

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.

Shouldn't we be outraged by email implications?

[mentaiko]

Much more than their capturing of all port 80 traffic, I am irritated by what has happened to email.

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

• Read my entire message
• Stick my name and email address into their database for marketing and resale

Shouldn't this be the main concern?

Re:So who gets the money ?

[squiggleslash]

Part of running a name lookup system includes receiving queries for names that do not exist. I hardly call it "doing it free" considering that Verisign receives money for every registered entry in that table.

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?

VeriSign Power Play

[johnthorensen]

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

Re:So who gets the money ?

[Directrix1]

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.