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

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?