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ICANN, IAB Ask VeriSign to Suspend SiteFinder

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the trying-the-polite-approach-first dept.

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."

6 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. So who gets the money ? by EpsCylonB · · Score: 4, Interesting

    VeriSign's wildcard creates a registry-synthesized address record in response to lookups of domains that are not otherwise present in the zone (including restricted names, unregistered names, and registered but inactive names). The VeriSign wildcard redirects traffic that would otherwise have resulted in a "no domain" response to a VeriSign-operated website with search results and links to paid advertisements.

    Why should VeriSign get the money ?

  2. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...in the meetings in which Verisign decided to implement SiteFinder.

    Do you think they innocently believed they had found a valid loophole for commercial exploitation a legitimate feature of the Internet protocols?

    Or did they say something like this? "Well, OK, so it does violate DNS specifications. People will scream. Let them scream. Nobody can touch us. The IETF has only moral authority. And ICANN and the U. S. Department of Commerce are never going to interfere seriously with any big, successful Internet company. So a few technies get angry, big deal."

  3. Re:This isn't really new. by Tirel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    because .com and .net amount to 99% of the internet and nobody really cares about smaller tlds (ie, .nu and so on)

  4. Re:This isn't really new. by LostCluster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    .com and .net are the two huge TLDs, so implementing wildcard sites on smaller TLDs just wasn't quite as outragious. Also, in the past, most wildcards were sites that only offered to register the non-existing domain at the monopoly registrar of that TLD.

    The controversy on SiteFinder seems to be that they're offering query-based ads, which essentially says "It's against the rules to register the typo of your competitor, but we'll sell you an ad on the site that results from that typo."

  5. A great hack.. by mindstrm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    except, this type of thing is not the responsibility of the DNS.

    The fact that we tend to use DNS as an index of everything, and that humans can't get over "Www." is OUR problem, not a problem with DNS. DNS is a precise lookup service... we'd just like it to function as it always has, thanks.

    DNS wasn't put here to look up websites, it's far more fundamental than that.. and if people are too lazy to learn how to use a web browser right.. tough cookies for them. We should not be mangling DNS in order to do it.

    DNS is about a LOT more than just you looking up a web address, and to break it now is absurd.

    If you want a feature like you suggest, you build it at the application level, into the web browser... you don't mess with the fundamental protocols involved.

  6. robots.txt by Krashed · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Any site that sitefinder "helps" you with has a robots.txt file that disallows all agents. I am trying to access an old site of mine that was archived on the WaybackMachine and it won't let me access the old information now. Verisign must be stopped at all cost.