ICANN Gives VeriSign 36 Hours to Pull Sitefinder

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ICANN Gives VeriSign 36 Hours to Pull Sitefinder

Posted by michael on Friday October 3, 2003 @04:49AM from the or-else-we'll-say-stop-again dept.

Froomkin writes "ICANN this morning announced that it sent VeriSign an ultimatum: pull sitefinder by tomorrow evening or we'll sue. Details and links to discussion of the contractual and legal issues in ICANN Throws Down the Gauntlet to VeriSign on Sitefinder at ICANNWatch." Update: 10/03 19:29 GMT by M : Verisign blinked.

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The Message by beldraen · 2003-10-03 04:53 · Score: 5, Informative

3 October 2003

Via E-mail and U.S. Mail

Russell Lewis
Executive Vice President, General Manager
VeriSign Naming and Directory Services
21345 Ridgetop Circle LS2-3-2
Dulles, VA 20166-6503

Re: Deployment of SiteFinder Service

Dear Rusty:

This letter is further to the advisory posted by ICANN on 19 September 2003 regarding the changes to the operation of the .com and .net Top Level Domains announced by VeriSign on 15 September 2003, and in response to your letter of 21 September 2003. These changes involved the introduction (for the first time in the .com and .net domains) of a so-called "wildcard" mechanism that changes the expected error response for Internet traffic that would otherwise have resulted in a "no domain" response, and redirects that traffic to a VeriSign-operated webpage with links to alternative choices and to a search engine.

Because of numerous indications that these unannounced changes have had very significant impacts on a wide range of Internet users and applications, ICANN on 19 September 2003 asked VeriSign to voluntarily suspend these changes, and return to the previous behavior of .com and .net, until more information could be gathered on the impact of these changes. On 21 September 2003, VeriSign refused to honor that request. In the time since then, ICANN has had further opportunity to consider the technical and practical consequences of these changes, and to evaluate whether these unilateral actions by VeriSign were consistent with its contractual obligations to ICANN.

Based on the information currently available to us, it appears that these changes have had a substantial adverse effect on the core operation of the DNS, on the stability of the Internet, and on the relevant domains, and may have additional adverse effects in the future. These effects appear to be significant, including effects on web browsing, certain email services and applications, sequenced lookup services and a pervasive problem of incompatibility with other established protocols. In addition, the responses of various persons and entities to the changes made by VeriSign may themselves adversely affect the continued effective functioning of the Internet, the DNS and the .com and .net domains. Under these circumstances, the only prudent course of action consistent with ICANN's coordination mission is to insist that VeriSign suspend these changes pending further evaluation and study, including (but certainly not limited to) the public meeting already scheduled by ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee on 7 October in Washington, D.C.

In addition, our review of the .com and .net registry agreements between ICANN and VeriSign leads us to the conclusion that VeriSign's unilateral and unannounced changes to the operation of the .com and .net Top Level Domains are not consistent with material provisions of both agreements. These inconsistencies include violation of the Code of Conduct and equal access provisions, failure to comply with the obligation to act as a neutral registry service provider, failure to comply with the Registry Registrar Protocol, failure to comply with domain registration provisions, and provision of an unauthorized Registry Service. These inconsistencies with VeriSign's obligations under the .com and .net registry agreements are additional reasons why the changes in question must be suspended pending further evaluation and discussion between ICANN and VeriSign.

Given these conclusions, please consider this a formal demand to return the operation of the .com and .net domains to their state before the 15 September changes, pending further technical, operational and legal evaluation. A failure to comply with this demand will require ICANN

--
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
Re:Now we wait and see... by EricTheGreen · 2003-10-03 05:04 · Score: 5, Informative
IANAL, but this would most likely be the scenario:
1. ICANN presents a tort complaint to the Federal bench after the deadline, claiming breach of contract, per the language in their letter. They could start with a local one, but there would be immediate issues regarding diversity of jursidiction, so they'd probably best just start with the Feds
2. They also request an expedited decision on the issue (unlikely) and/or an immediate injunction granting relief of the breach, pending delayed decision.
3. If the judge is so inclined, requested injunction is granted, with Verisign enjoined to restore the pre 9/15 operational environment "with all due speed".
4. Verisign hopefully complies, but I'd expect lots of legal wrangling, covering every base from "claim lacks merit on it's face" through "court does not have appropriate jurisdiction", probably an appeal or two, although I think the only level up from Federal would be the Supreme Court. Whether they'd grant the appropriate writ of certiorari to hear the appeal would be questionable, but that's my opinion, not a legal one.
5. Assuming Verisign's legal tactics fail them, they're under legal requirement to comply. Failure to comply, in the court's view, would be a serious mistake with potentially significant consequences for the Verisign officers. Operational question here would be what constitutes "all due speed" in applying a remedy.
Stay tuned folks, some interesting viewing coming up regarding this.
Re:For what it's worth... by interiot · 2003-10-03 05:10 · Score: 5, Informative
This has been covered thousands of times before. Quick summary:
- wacky DNS when using WWW/HTTP: some could argue it's useful
- wacky DNS when taking into account everything else: several examples of protocols that break.
Re:For what it's worth... by Trepalium · 2003-10-03 05:35 · Score: 5, Informative

Yes, it does bounce, and (currently) the body of the message never makes it to verisign. The broken MTA running on sitefinder rejects any and all recipients with a 550 error. However, Verisign can change this at any time, so it's not exactly conforting (but it's still no reason to state things that aren't currently true). One thing you CAN complain about is it increases the amount of traffic to successfully bounce an e-mail. Verisign could also use it to harvest email addresses if they ever wanted to break into the spamming business (wouldn't put it past them).
220 sitefinder.verisign.com VeriSign mail rejector (Postfix) HELO dsnjkas 250 OK MAIL FROM: <sdnjkas@com.com> 250 Ok RCPT TO: <sdnjkasd@sdnfjkasd.com> 550 <unknown[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]>: Client host rejected: The domain you are trying to send mail to does not exist.

--
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
But that's just it.. by mindstrm · 2003-10-03 05:43 · Score: 5, Informative

You are SUPPOSED to be able to count on getting "DOMAIN NOT FOUND" errors.... DNS isn't google.. it's a precise, distributed database, that has served us well so far.

I have been hit by this problem already, where typos went unnoticed in scripts because a connection was made, and html returned.
I've had mail problems as well, where secondary MX was never tried, because of verisign's new trick.

It's handy for when you mistype.. unfortuntaely, looking up web pages is just one of many uses for the DNS.... and not at all what it was intended for.
Verisign relents by kindbud · 2003-10-03 07:14 · Score: 5, Informative

VeriSign Will Temporarily Suspend Web Navigation Service in Order to Continue To Work With Internet Community Towards a Long-Term Implementation

Good for them. Even better for us.

It's a press release from VRSN, so naturally it is full of half-truths and lies, but the bottom line is that they are getting in line. I doubt SiteFinder or wildcards will be resurrected after this debacle.

--
Edith Keeler Must Die
Re:For what it's worth... by bheerssen · 2003-10-03 07:36 · Score: 5, Informative

It's neither. It's a DNS issue. Full stop.

Here, have a loot at the IAB's point of view. They make a powerful case against the use of wildcarding in top level zones. The big thing is that it breaks a whole lot of protocols. HTTP isn't really that big a deal. ISPs could easily handle that in their DNS systems. Currently there are so many public and private protocols being used that nobody, not even Verisign, can properly provide for them using a wildcarding sytem, yet that is what Verisign is actually doing. And they are doing it very badly.

It increases network traffic, incurring more cost to ISPs and consumers. It makes it very difficult to present proper error codes for protocols that Verisign did not anticipate such as IRC. It breaks old protocols for which clients are not being developed but still provide a valuable function. For protocols that are still supported, it incurs higher costs for those users since the developers will need to update their software. There are so many problems with wildcarding that even the IAB gave up listing them after a dozen or so.

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(Score: -1, Stupid)