VeriSign Responds To ICANN's SiteFinder Advisory

dmehus writes "VeriSign's Naming and Directory Services division has written to ICANN President and CEO Paul Twomey regarding the recent advisory concerning VeriSign's DNS wildcard redirection service. In the letter, VeriSign's Rusty Lewis says that they are open to independent and objective technical concerns expressed by various Internet bodies; they have formed their own "independent" panel of industry leading experts to produce its own, separate report; and they will not voluntarily suspend SiteFinder. It's a very terse response, and frankly, I'd have expected more from them. Slashdot readers are encouraged to visit ICANNWatch for in-depth, expert discussion on this and other issues."

Comments

Another real danger is...

[Atario]

...that enough of a ruckus will be kicked up over this that someone will have the following bright idea:

Let's make this illegal!

Voila. Government steps in to take over .net, .com., and .org. Everyone's screwed. So much for the free, cooperative, works-of-our-own-free-will Internet. Thanks, Verisign.

Re:Huh?

[Ark42]

http://verisignsucks.museum/

Just as an example.

I think *.museum is ok to have a wildcard for though, since not everybody can go out registering a museum domain name. It works similar to .com.au (unless .com.au changed recently). .com/.net and any other domain that requires no special terms to register domains for, should NOT have wildcards.

Re:Gimme a break

[Jason1729]

Why do you seek to portray Verisign as such a sleazy company?

Because they are and always have been.

Besides using the fact that they run the root servers to hijack all unused addresses, in the past they've sent misleading correspondance to domain name owners to get them to switch registrars to verisign when all they want to do is renew.

Re:Huh?

[rgmoore]

As to your call for us to suspend the service, I would respectfully suggest that it would be premature to decide on any course of action until we first have had an opportunity to collect and review the available data.

That's an interesting thing for them to say, especially because earlier in the letter they said:

All indications are that users, important members of the internet community we all serve, are benefiting from the improved web navigation offered by Site Finder.

So which is it? Have they not yet had a chance to gather any data, or have they gathered the data and found that it's beneficial to users? Or, as seems most likely, are they just saying anything that they think will get ICANN off their backs for long enough for them to sell a bunch of registrations?

Is it accessible to the blind?

[effer]

If not, what better target for a lawsuit!

Re:Gimme a break

[Frodrick]

Give them some credit; they are only trying to make a buck and survive as a company.

Doing any sleazy thing one can imagine just because their lawyers think they can probably get away with it is not an appropriate way to do business - or an honorable one.

And "just doing what they needed to do to survive" is the same excuse the Donner Party used.

.museum versus .com

[TWX]

If one looks at the newsgroups as historically how something like this works, the .museum TLD is a highly restrictive, highly controlled domain. It's entire purpose is for respected institutions to be listed. So, them having a master index and a reply indicating an invalid domain makes sense, since the entire domain listing easily scrolls through a few screens only. It would be the equivalent of a comp or sci newsgroup; highly structured groups with moderation and content rules.

.com is the tld equivalent of alt., where anyone can create and post anything, without moderation, without structure. Attempting to impose structure, in the form of sitefinder, is stupid in this instance, since the organizations represented in .com are usually for-profit or attempting to jockey for position. If I have a business, do I now have to register every possible combination of my domain to keep idiots from being redirected to a customer of mine because they paid verisign to add them to the referral page for a misspelling of my domain name? I also have to worry about verisign giving precedence to domains registered through them in the recommended sites, and if I have a godaddy.com-registered domain, will I end up being denied business that would normally have realised that they made a typo, to fix it and come to me?

This is the real problem that I have with sitefinder. It being in the hands of a commercial organization who has exhibited a systematic behaviour of putting profit before anything else will only exploit this situation. They will start selling placement on messed up domain entries, they will start denying domains registered through other registrars the same regular placement as their own, and they will destroy what had been a fairly free and open system.

I'd recommend that if Verisign doesn't immediately stop this insanity that we write to our legislators and demand that control of the TLDs that versign manages be removed and handed to ICANN to deal with directly.

What you can do about SiteFinder

[Jim McCoy]

I will leave aside the hysterical responses others have proposed and suggest two simple actions that you can take to deal with this attempted coup by Verisign.

• Contact your ISP (or do yourself if you run your own DNS) and be sure that they have implemented the update to BIND which locks out this behavior. The truly obsessives will also go out and start finding random DNS servers and testing them to see if they are allowing anything more than delegation from *.com and *.net and then notifying DNS admins as appropriate.
• Make your feelings known to the other co-conspirator in this system: Overture. They are providing the back-end to this service and since they have been recently acquired by a publicly traded company (Yahoo) you may feel the need to contact Yahoo to express your opinion on this particular product line (or perhaps express your views in forums where Yahoo shareholders may be found.

Hit them where it hurts, in the bottom-line. Complaining to everyone may get this fixed, but patching your nameserver and then going after the back-end may also get results.

Re:+4 Informative ?

[signe]

Not really. You posted anonymously, I didn't. Nothing against you (since I have no idea who you are, obviously), but I set very little stock by anything posted without a name. I understand that there are reasons to post anonymously, such as to not bring down the wrath of an employer. However, there's still the concept of if you won't even sign your name to what you've said, how much can it be worth? Additionally, a lot of moderators take the tact of never moderating AC posts up. And you also started your post with a personal insult, which a lot of people automatically view as flamebait.

Either way, the important thing is that someone got modded up to point out how wrong that guy was. And that he got modded down.

-Todd

Re:I'm lost, please help.

[ScottSpeaks!]

There are a variety of problems with this.

• The most fundamental one from a systems-management standpoint (and the internet itself is one huge systems-management nightmare) is that DNS lookup is a core function that affects a lot more than just web browsing. You don't change such a core function without thoroughly testing the impact of such a change. At the very least, the co-operative nature of the internet requires that you at least tell everyone you're going to do it. And when people complain that you've just broken something, you damn well better put it back the way it was.
• A case in point: A lot of anti-spam software uses DNS look-ups to identify bogus return addresses. Since DNS for .com and .net is no longer returning "not found" for bogus domains, this function is now failing.
• Various legislatures and/or courts have passed/interpretted laws to forbid "squatters" from registering other people's trademarks (or typos of them) for themselves. Verisign has effectively just "registered" every unregistered/mistyped trademark and pointed it to their web site. For example, there's a local business who hasn't registered their name (a trademark) as a domain name. If someone asks for (thisbusinessname).com, Verisign will direct them to a web site (theirs) which instead suggests several other web sites. For the right price, a competitor of this business can have their web site listed here. This is no different from a competitor or unauthorised squatter registering the domain name... which they could be successfully sued for doing. The fact that Verisign is now profiting from the use of trademarks it does not own puts it on very shaky legal ground.
• This is a classic case of abuse of monopoly power. In much the same way that (for example) the US FCC licenses broadcasters to use the public airwaves in ways consistent with the public good, Network Solutions (now owned by Verisign) was assigned responsibility for the .com and .net top-level-domains to be operated in ways consistent with the good of the internet community. Reckless management of that responsility, resulting in technical problems which it refuses to correct, and taking financial advantage of that trust in a way unavailable to any other entity... adds up to a "problem".

Re:Demand? Legislators? No: do something useful!

[drakaan]

There was no problem...There are a number of unscrupulous registrars that also host tld's, and Verisign has recently proved itself to be the most sickeningly ballsy of them. If Verisign is allowed to generate revenue from a service that could never be competed against (and this specific one can't, without screwing things up worse than they already are), then why don't we just hand them the "keys to the internet" and walk away. Greed *is* foolishness, in this case as well as the one you pointed out.

If selfless people existed, we might discuss what they could produce. That said, there are many generous people who are also intelligent and hard working that have made huge contributions to the computing world. As a result of them, we have the Internet, Web sites, Linux, and various less-well-known projects and products.

I call bullshit on this one. Verisign is being greedy and abusing their stewardship. They don't own .com or .net, but they are making decisions for all of us that do own a part of it. If my $35.00 doesn't go to support those "willingly-provided" DNS servers, then why did I pay it? The solution is to roll back the clock 14 days and not have this "Service" implemented. If Verisign wants typos to drive traffic, they should do what everyone else is forced to do, and buy a browser.

Re:Huh?

[Leto2]

msaulters, for completeness, since you seem to be intimately knowledgeable on the RFCs, can you paste the relevant sections from these three RFCs that apply to Verisign's wildcarding?