Slashdot Mirror
ICANN Gives VeriSign 36 Hours to Pull Sitefinder
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.
Go ICANN? Wow, now I am really confused... who are the good guys again?
I think ICANN should basically tell VeriSign, "If you pull this crap again you're through." VeriSign doesn't deserve to be in the position they are in, IMO. This pretty much proves it.
Do you ever visit a domain with .com or .net TLD? If so then you use Verisign yourself. You're relying on the root DNS servers that they manage.
So, basically, if I read this right
ICANN doesn't per se have a problem with the Sitefinder service, but rather, the manner in which VeriSign implemented it?
Ugh.
So basically, they're asking VeriSign to stop until they can take a look at it, give it a green light, and rubber-stamp it
ICANN shouldn't have to sue anyone over a technical aspect of the Internet. They should have the tools to simply tell Verisign to do it and have it done quickly. And they should also have the means to simply cut Verisign out of the loop if push comes to shove (and let Verisign sue if they are unhappy).
I do, because when I signed up it was 'Network Solutions' and back then it was a breeze doing business with that company. Now, though, is a different story. I get spammed by them, I get the run-around if I want to tranfer my domain name, and I now have a horrible customer web interface I *have* to use since calling them on the phone gives me an unintelligent and impatient customer service. I can't risk losing the domain name because of some bureaucratic "limbo" caused by Verisign's inability to do their job. I get to try to transfer my domain to another registrar this december. Let's hope I get lucky and it happens smoothly.
Do I use them? Yes, unfortunately I do at the moment.
Failure to comply with this demand by that time will leave ICANN with no choice but to seek promptly to enforce VeriSign's contractual obligations.
/theirass/head, then perhaps a class action suit of all those whose mail-servers are being bogged by the new "service" should be put into effect?
What are these obligations, and what exactly got into VeriScam's mind that they could overlook these, and the general obligations to their customers (mainly, those on the internet, and those running servers that depend on the service in particular).
We have here a service which has, to some extend, broken how many of the tried-and-true mechanisms work. While it might be true that there are no RFC's to cover this, when something has been function for a long duration and a change, in effects, damages that functionality, I think there are greater considerations. If VeriSign doesn't rm
The amazing thing to me was that they went through a big development effort and believed that they were going to be allowed to do it. They really have lost their marbles if they think that their contract allows them to do this type of stuff.
So what exactly is ICANN going to do if they do not comply? The threat of legal action doesn't mean too much, as it can take years to resolve and based on the legal system's understanding of current technology, the outcome is completely up in the air.
Could ICANN actually transfer everything to another company? How long would this take? Is anybody set up to handle this? Think of all the little registrars which exist today, would this be a huge job?
As much as I want them to stop, this response makes a lot of sense, unfortunately: "So the key question now is, 'what will Verisign do?'... My gut reaction is to guess that they're not going to comply. Why should they? They're making mumble-mumble dollars per day on this 'feature,' which is multiples of what it will cost them to fight ICANN's demand, even if it goes to court. Every day that they drag it out is money in the bank... I predict that Verisign will very politely decline ICANN's "request," and state that the issue requires more study before coming to a conclusion. Much like any controversial aspect of ICANN's operation needs 'more study' before moving forward. It's worked in the past; I suspect it'll work now."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
No, I don't have a solution. Just pointing out that this is just a symptom of a larger problem.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
I'm not sure that your comments are accurate.
While it may be unfair on a number of levels to redirect nonexistant domains, I'm not so sure that it's against the law. A company like Verisign is in control of something that affects a large number of people, which can potentially be used for profitable purposes. Verisign (AFIAK) is still one of the most expensive registrars and is probably looking for other sources of income. Since they control a good chunk of the internet's name resolution, I think this is still within their legal rights. Anyone else with more credibility is welcome to correct me here if I'm wrong.
In terms of general fairness, you're absolutely correct -- benefiting from others' misfortune, be it a mistyped URL or something more serious, is hardly fair. Good luck, ICANN.
Verisign received trusteeship of the COM and NET TLDs by ICANN, the government and the rest of the Internet standards bodies. They are free to promote the domains but are obligated to act in a neutral fashion and keep the DNS running. They are required to act as a neutral third-party with regard to providing a network service much in the same way it did when DNS was run as a government funded, non-profit organization (InterNIC).
ICANN's pissed and rightly so. The average Internet user has no idea how the net really works with regard to DNS. To them, www.google.com is the Internet. To the techies, we know the names are just thin veneers over the IP addresses that really control and make things happen. Until this affects the average user, only the geeks and techies of the world will care about this.
Verisign has gone and broken THE CORE PROTOCOL of what makes the Internet work! Without DNS, we would have to use and memorize IP addresses. DNS is supposed to work by returned an answer as to whether or not a name is mapped to an IP address and provide that address.
By building SiteFinder, they have waived their right as a neutral third party and are now trying to co-opt the largest domain registries in the world for their own personal profit and use. In doing so, they have also broken the software contract between DNS and its users. They've changed the interface that people expect to work a certain and broken or severely damaged the functionality of software around the world. When mail servers can't figure out if an e-mail is forged or not, it's only going to be a matter of time before the spammers clue in and increase bandwidth usage across the board until things change.
What Verisign fails to acknowledge is that registry is not theirs to do that with. It was paid for by taxpayer dollars and grants over many years from countless communities and can be considered a public utility. There cannot be preferential treatment in this. Or they can claim that the COM/NET TLDs are their intellectual property and they can do with it as they please. They want to do that? Fine, they can push for a new TLD to be added to the hierarchy for private use which they can manage. Turn over COM/NET to a neutral non-profit and let them run it as a public trust.
Yeah, well a lot of mail software relies on that, and one of the worst things about this is that Verisign is actually receiving a lot of mail that wasn't for them in the first place; they get to read, analyse and keep and it never, ever arrives where it was intended and doesn't bounce either.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"although I think the only level up from Federal would be the Supreme Court
There is a Federal Appeals Circuit between the usual federal courts and the Supremes. If Verisign is so inclined, the appeals court would probably take their complaint under consideration, but would (probably) get back within a day or so saying "no". In general, appeals courts don't like to deal with temporary things. Verisign can still use such a strategy to buy a little time, but it's really only enough for them to figure out a way to buy yet more time.
Network solutions shouldn't have been allowed to get into any business besides selling domain names and providing DNS. Anything else (like selling ads on their sitefinder) and there is a risk they will do something to DNS to promote their other products rather than improve usability (as they did). They shouldn't even be allowed to send unlimited e-mails to domain name owners.
TLD registrars and DNS providers should be small companies, run by people who are content to do a job and make a small profit, but not have unlimited freedom/growth potential of a private company that doesn't provide any exclusive service to the public.
I hope ICANN moves in that direction right away and not even bother with separate lawsuits for various small points.
Even if others could, it would be still against the law because its not right.
Ahh, to see the world through the eyes of a child...
No, it's a valid and allowed use of this. Basically, the International Council of Museums negotiated with ICANN the ability to do this, and then to only allow "proper" museums to have .museum domains.
This is an example of why there is the capability to have wildcards, it's a productive use of the system IMO.
See this page for more info.
We talked about the lawsuit here and it's rather similar.
Review: Zurakov filed a class action suit against register.com because he registered a domain and, while he was building it, his domain pointed to a register.com "coming soon" page that had links to services and so on. The argument: they were using his domain to profit.
In Verisign's case, I suppose they could argue that the sites belong to no one, but haven't we seen court precedence against this sort of thing?
The two cases have interesting parallels, IMO.
IANAL. Not FDIC Insured.
best web host ever
That's the trouble with protocols... once they're set good luck ever getting rid of them.
The $64,000 question is, can the domain not found response be modified at all without breaking the protocol? For instance, to have older programs recognize the error, but next generation programs (web browsers mainly) be able to return useful information like possible alternatives? This would allow for smarter, more functional programs without breaking legacy apps.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
One thing they could do for example, is bounce all emails but 'accept' 1 email out of 10000 before bouncing, in order to gather 'statistical data' for various purposes of their choosing.
Given that they implemented sitefinder with no warning, it is unlikely that they give any warning before implementing the 'feature' I mention above...
They already kind of do this, trying different combinations of appending .com, prepending www., and that could be expanded into a wider search. Invalid domains can be turned into search terms.
This is a UI issue, not a protocol issue. It can best solved in the UI, i.e., in the browser. And the browsers, while not always acting in good faith, have done exactly this.
If you want to change the behaviour of web browsers, it should be coded on the browsers it self. A few (several?) browsers already do it. Why would anyone want to add another layer of complexity to DNS, which is already a painful and bug-prone protocol ?
Changing the fundamental base of the Internet just to affect one kind of application it not only stupid , but totally irresponsable.
morcego
There are also other TLDs which have a wildcard in them as well. The big difference between them and what VeriSign is doing, though, is that the .museum TLD has one registrar. You don't have a choice of which Registrar to use when registering a .museum name. With .com and .net, though, you have a large choice (register.com, godaddy.com, etc, etc, etc).
And, the .museum domain isn't just for anyone. If you mistype a .museum domain and get redirected to a page at MuseDoma, the page is likely going to say something like "The museum URL you are trying to visit does not exist. You can't purchase this domain unless you are a museum, your name reflects the domain name you typed, and you meet our other qualifications".
VeriSign's sitefinder site could say this: "The domain you are trying to visit doesn't exist. But we would be happy to sell it to you. Pay VeriSign the fee and its yours." Where does this leave the competing Registrars of the .com and .net domains? Out in the cold.
Currently, SiteFinder is this: "The domain you are trying to visit does not exist. Thanks for mis-typing it so that we (VeriSign) could show you this search engine. By visiting SiteFinder, VeriSign is going to profit from your mis-typing by way of advertising. Only VeriSign will profit from your mistype of a .com or .net domain. The other registrars for .com and .net domains won't see a penny of this. We hope this will generate over $100 Million for VeriSign."
This is in addition to the many other problems it caused.
You mean like how Mozilla -used to- do a google search for me if the domain didn't exist?
That's something I specifically wanted, and configured Mozilla to do. Google is rather good at guessing what I wanted when I mistype stuff.
And it's a feature that VeriSlime have now broken for me. Sitefinder is almost completely useless at guessing my typos, and the only way to get the old behaviour back is patching DNS to return NXDOMAIN like it used to.
Many ISP's in New Zealand are already running a patched DNS that ignores VeriSlime. My current ISP is one of them, but I still keep seeing sitefinder in places like the ODP editor.
Hell, that brings up another point. The ODP editor interface has various tools for checking that sites still exist, so that editors don't have to go through the tedious task of checking them all periodically. Guess how SiteSquatter affects those tools?
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Can it be? Yes. Is there any reason to? No.
DNS has a specific purpose. It takes a hierarchical, human readable name, and gives back an numerical IP that's usable for routing. It does it pretty well. It doesn't know why an IP is being requested, whether it's for HTTP, FTP or any other protocol. If it did, we'd be modifying the DNS protocol whenever we added a new protocol that wanted some other sort of information from the DNS. This is why we have a layered protocol stack - each layer/protocol takes care if it's own job, and doesn't have to know about the rest. It works much better than single insanely complex monolithic protocol that has to know about every other protocol in use.
The decision as to what should be done when a name is invalid should rest with the client. You know, the way that Internet Explorer has been providing almost exactly the same functionality for several years now? In a way that broke _nothing_ else? Modifying the DNS protocol to provide possible alternatives provides nothing over a solution which implements it over the appropriate level.
Why?
Hello?! ICANN does not need a hearing because you, Verisign, breached your contract, not a law or something!