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3rd Lawsuit Against VeriSign Seeks Class Action
dmehus writes "A third lawsuit has been filed late Friday in a federal district court in California against VeriSign, Inc. over its controversial DNS wildcard redirection service known as SiteFinder. According to the article, it was filed by longtime Internet litigator Ira Rothken. In addition, while two other lawsuits have been filed by Go Daddy Software, Inc. and Popular Enterprises, LLC. in Arizona and Florida, this is the first lawsuit to seek class-action status."
Verisign truly has no shame, but the reason they can get away with this is simple: most people on the net now are new to it, and have not the faintest idea about how the net used to be a cooperative medium, where bullshit like this was not tolerated. Today? No such luck, users expect to be scammed and abused with every click, they will accept this, and they are the majority.
Recently, the .museum TLD went live. It's just like any other TLD except that domains that don't exist diect you to a page saying the domain doesn't exist and with a couple of links. Many other countries also do this sort of thing with their domains. They're not very different than Verisign's SIteFinder, but there's little to no outcry over this. I'm curious because a lot of the objections about SiteFinder should also be true about the .museum TLD and all the others. What's different here?
And don't tell me because nobody uses those domains, that it's okay. That's just an elitist view and also blatant hypocrisy.
What about Email, IRC, USENET etc etc... How would that be forwarded to a search engine? HOw do I prompt a user in IRC to choose which is the mistyped addresses they really meant? Do you expect half the software for internet communication to be re-written?
The Internet is not just the web!
And this is a very stupid, ill-thought out idea!!
D.
This would ruin the authoritative nature of DNS. It's not supposed to be an "approximation" system. Doing the above would cause more problems than it would solve, as it would leave to misdirected emails, misdirected websurfers, and big privacy and security issues.
Failed lookups are a good thing. It empowers the end-user to decide how to best handle those errors. Shifting that power to the registry (in the case of Verisign's Sitefinder), or to BIND (hosted by the ISP) would remove power from end-users.
I see big problems arising from this. One, if it looks like VeriSign will lose, they will more than likely settle out of court and make sure an issue like this stay untested as to be lawful or not. Just like the DMCA mess and the mass suing from the RIAA.
.com/.net domain on good faith really. No one has the power to remove them from handling these domains. There is no true law up to this point on who owns them and what guidelines they HAVE to follow. Even the RFC's don't contain any insight on how something like this should be handeled.
Second, VeriSign is handling the
Do we really want the gov (at any level) to start getting their hands in this? Do we want another self appointed body saying what can and cannot go? Both of which, to me, are scary but it seems that the "self healing" that the internet was built apon is failing at this point. Even if another RFC is written, who's to say that VeriSign will follow it?
I see no good comming from this really. The only good ending would be that VeriSign halts its practice on its own and an RFC is drafted to prevent this in the future and people follow it. The only issue I see there is it's still done on faith and it looks like faith has gone the way of the dot.coms.