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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.
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.
Neither. Rather, think of it like two gangs fighting over territory, in this case, control of DNS.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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.
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!"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.
/.ers have pointed out, they can just instruct the root servers to route around the damage.
They are not suing. They are, in fact, leveraging their contract - their tool - and telling verisign to get it done and have it done quickly. Specifically, 36 hours. The thing about the business world is that if they didn't make sure that they were on strong grounds, if they demanded the service be taken down and then got sued, then they'd be indemnable for whatever money verisign made up that they lost on absent sitefinder service.
ICANN is doing the right thing, in fact the very thing that we're angry that VeriSign didn't do: they're checking that their actions are correct before undertaking them. ICANN has a responsibility to be proper and careful, rather than just running around swinging its arms like a bully (which some would say that it has done in the past.)
Look, you can't please everybody: if you do it fast people will say you didn't plan, and if you plan people will say you didn't do it fast enough. Don't you think it best that they do this in the way that's most difficult for VeriSign to prevent?
It's difficult to be the good guy.
And they should also have the means to simply cut Verisign out of the loop
As has been pointed out, they have implied that they will do just that in about 36 hours if their demands aren't met. As other
(Of course, nobody seems to be pointing out that there's going to be the demand for some tremendous bandwidth and heavy servers pretty on-the-spot if they choose to do that. I find myself wondering which company will attempt to step up to the bat and steal the gold ring, if VeriSign fucks this up.)
StoneCypher is Full of BS