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ICANN Asks VeriSign To Stop DNS Wildcarding
MrClever writes "In this article over at the Sydney Morning Herald (AU), it looks as though ICANN may actually be doing something about the VeriSign changes to .com and .net TLD's. Apparently, while they have been noticably quiet, they have been reviewing community reaction and analysed data from a technical perspective. Here's hoping ICANN pull the plug on VeriSign's TLD administration rights!" And TALlama writes "RSS.com.com (dear $DIETY, will it ever stop?) is reporting that ICANN has asked VeriSign 'to voluntarily suspend the service' of wildcarding DNS, 'pending further study.' Calling it a 'service' is a little bit of a misnomer. If I punch people in the face, can I call that a service, too?"
Unlike other TLDs, namely several country codes, .com and .net have a number of resellers.
.com and .net, they're unfairly leveraging their position to the exclusion of other registrars. They are in effect conveying the message that they run the web.
TLDs with a monopoly really can't be told what to do, because there's no one competing with them in the first place.
With VeriSign doing this on
The point of standards is that you can rely on them. The internet standards are decided on a lengthy consensus process, and at this point the basic protocols of the internet are only changed very slowly and for very good technical reasons. Thus, once you have implemented a service or component based on a standard protocol such as DNS, you can be happy and count on not needing to maintain the component any more. It would set a horrendous precedent if internet infrastructure could be changed at will for marketing reasons, with no repercussions. Suddenly *every* piece of software relying on internet would need a maintenance team ready to change them at a moment's notice. This costs a lot of money, especially for services that are ready, done and just work.