ICANN To Hold Hearing About Site Finder

An anonymous reader writes "According to article at InfoWorld, ICANN has scheduled a "fact-gathering meeting" concerning Verisign's wildcarding of the .com and .net Top Level Domains on Oct. 7 in Washington, D.C. Comments about Site Finder can be sent to the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee at secsac-comment@icann.org. Here's your chance to be heard."

Comments

this is where US-ians can help...

[feepcreature]

Those of you living in the USA can help by raising the mismanagement of the internet with your Congresscritters or Senators (or whatever you call them). Unfortunately, we aliens would be written off as troublemakers complaining about how the US runs "its" internet. So it's up to you!

Fortunately, the issues are simple enough for politicians (and the great unwashed) to understand:

• important since it affects the whole internet
• government responsible since it controls the system via Dept of Commerce
• unilateral action by the company entrusted with running .com and .net, flagrantly ignoring standards, regulations, and users
• unfair commercial advantage to that company - bad for competition
• breaks "lots of stuff" on the internet (examples left as an exercise for the reader)
• could get you more spam!
• thin end of wedge - if Verisign (with the privileges given them by the DoC, via ICANN) get away with ignoring net standards and norms, we create a precedent for rogue states and other bodies to damage the internet and the strategic interests of "the free world" by even more damaging self-interested unilateral action
• failure by US government to fix the problem will potentially embarrass the USA, and increase pressure to remove its control of the internet (which would probably be a good thing, except that the UN would probably be even worse than the USA)

You can think of lots more reasons, no doubt.