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ICANN Study Slams Verisign
Dinglenuts writes "ICANN has just released what I'm sure is a completely neutral and unbiased report, condemning Verisign's Sitefinder service for running afoul of 'community standards and caus[ing] harm to individual users and enterprises.' Seeing as how ICANN is currently being sued by Verisign for making them take down Sitefinder, this opinion can be considered less than revolutionary."
It is the same as with dictators.. Any company that grows big and has influence must take very good care not to abuse it. I donnot have to give names, and some companies even believe themselves they have 'best intentions'.
But on-topic: i think verisign should loose there license. They have proven they cannot be trusted as independent tld maintainer.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
The next meeting, which starts Monday, features a workshop aimed at bridging the gap between ICANN and the United Nations, which is becoming increasingly interested in Internet governance.
The UN getting interested in governing the net?
Well, it was fun while it lasted. I'm off to spend the last few weeks of internet existence with the badgers.
After this whole thing started I simply had my dns cache resolve verisign.com addresses through my local dns server... problem solved. In fact, I'd forgotten about the whole thing...
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I'm still amazed by all of this, its really mind boggling. This is no better than those squatter sites (amazing search! etc) and they have complete control over the content and are trying to force everyone to see it. Its sad what some companies are trying to do for money.
ICANN's SSAC came up with the right answer with respect to Verisign's "Sitefinder" but they did so using a method that contains the seeds of an even greater danger to the net: unprincipled and subjective condemnation of change on the net.
m l
See my note on this at http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog-archives/000108.ht
From the article: ""Different people and different organizations have divergent views on what constitutes the common good, on what constitutes acceptable and desirable goals, and what are legitimate and ethical constraints," Auerbach wrote..."
It's interesting to watch the dynamic that is the evolution of the administration of the net. ICANN is seen by much of the world as to American centric and requiring, possibly a UN governing body to replace it or some other world centric governing body. Perhaps the growing pains of the European Union could offer some lessons as to how to best govern the net. It must irk many nations and organizations to see the administration and future plans for the net played out in American courts.
Tim Berners-Lee saw the founding of the web as a world wide endeavour surely a body as important as ICANN should be under the ageis of the UN?
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
It's the UN. Their just like the League of Nations only they talk bigger, having possibly less impact.
I knew Jeremy Porter when he was on ICANN, and that man is a total prick.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
ICANN bad, Verisign bad, which side are we on?
ICANN knows who's to blame, but they aren't in the buisness of naming names.
Wait yes, they are V-E-R-I-S-I-G-N.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
On a somewhat related note, I'm wondering if it even makes sense to waste energy bashing governments and corporations anymore. Sure, a corporation is a fictitious person, but that sure looks like real signatures on the contracts and international treaties.
C|N>K
ICANN and Verisign are behaving in the same way as a pair of spoilt toddlers. What the world needs is for their teacher to come along and give the pair of them a slap
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
What really needs to happen is that domain registration and management needs to be handled by a non-profit organization, so they don't have as much of an incentive to screw with stuff. I'm not convinced that registrars like Verisign should even be allowed to exist.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The advantage of having the browser deal with it is that I can turn it on or off (or even customise it) and that it doesn't affect anyone else. The higher up the chain you make the changes, the more people and things you affect.
Talking of error messages, Verisign does have a point when it comes to Firefox. I find their error messages really rather poor (that is, the ones that the browser shows once you've dug out the option from the bowels which really, IMO, should be on by default).
If I submitted better formatted and more informative descriptions for them do you think they'd even consider it? Or is it handled a different way?
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I hate Sitefinder as much as the rest of you, but you can bet your asses that it will be reintroduced. It's a moneymaking machine, and I'm sure Verisign won't let all the work behind Sitefinder down the drain.
It's a pity, but it's exactly what PHB's wants.
Oh, come on. The Internet survived the US for decades, I doubt the UN (i.e. the good folks that brought us international telecommunications standardization) would kill it any time soon.
The UN did what? You may wish to give much credit to ETSI, which has nothing to do with the UN. Except that the US bypassed it unilaterally hence being practically the only country in the world that has mobiles not conforming to the GSM standard (and we've seen enough slashdot posts confirming what a bad move that was).
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
ICANN is a mess. Verisign is doing things that are wrong. I guess I side with Microsoft... Oh crap. Um...
TW
Television is dead. Long live That Weasel Television
'nuff said.
I actually read the report, and I have to say that it is pretty sound.
Although ICANN totally sucks as an organization, the committee certainly did a good job with this report. How the original poster could suggest that it is a strongly biased "propaganda" report is beyond me.
Will Verisign try to find issue with the report? I'm sure. After all, isn't it in the financial and legal interest of Verisign to counter its critics?
Not surprisingly, no one has yet to post counter-claims to the issues and assumptions made in the report.
It is a report, and it may make assumptions, but it certainly isn't a whitewash.
I don't like defending Verisign, but something IS wrong here. Why is it that they get slammed for running sitefinder when many other TLDs such as .museum and the infamous .cx run similar services and without any complaint from the community? If we're going to oppose this sort of thing, we must be consistent about it instead of just singling out one offender and letting the rest alone.
It's the Security and Stability Advisory Committee of Icann which issued the report not the Board of Icann! This committee is literally filled with top-notch DNS experts (see here: Members of the Committee) and I don't think they give a rat's ass about Icann's issues with VeriSign. Btw, 2 VS employees are also members of the SSAC...
Now keep on flaming!
How about a bit of ballance, remember that ICANN is *supposed* to police this stuff, and Verisign's actions were just unbelievably bad. Verisign are suing ICANN for finally doing its job, even if you don't like ICANN you can't support Verisign in this.
Perhaps ICANN are simply doing what so many other companies love to do, but cutting out the middleman?
:-P
[No, I'm not serious. The "studies" others quote are usually independent in a sense, just carefully selected in topic and configuration to be likely to be faviourable, then only published if they're faviourable.]
On another note, SiteFinder was pretty awful. As someone who rejected spam from invalid domains, I felt the pain when SiteFinder went live within minutes. Oh, the spam! It also considerably increased our mail server load for another reason - it tried to deliver bounces to invalid domains instead of freezing them or never generating them.
If VeriSign try to bring that back, I'm finding another Internet
Just because ICANN is a power-grabbing organization with very little connection to the Internet community doesn't mean this report is off-base. Operators genuinely dislike Sitefinder for a number of both technical and political reasons. Sitefinder is bad, stop pretending like it isn't.
.cx and the like are national tlds and therefore not icanns problem
.museum that sounds like a crappy new tld that noone gives a fuck about
as for
to sound: to fathom : to measure the depths of : to understand.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
My spelling may be wrong. I haven't bothered to check. The term, (although possibly mispelled), was correct as to its meaning. There was no need to suggest alternative terms. Your reasoning is fundamentally flawed. You're stupid, get over it and live with it, but don't inflict it on other people.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Fortunately the Internet is designed to survive even the UN. The UN like ICANN forget two important facts, we could go all the way back to IP addresses and not use DNS - or much more likely start TLDs outsie the current framework. This is most likely and in fact is already being done. In reality, due to ICANN and Verisign's "muscle control" there are already alternate root servers serving up TLDs - some can be found at: http://www.fact-index.com/a/al/alternate_dns_root. html
Each time ICANN and Verisign roadblock good TLD initiatives by competative to Verisign companies the alternative DNS structure grows.
It's really sad that VeriSign's claiming that ICANN is attempting to stop them from "innovating". VeriSign could provide the same service by using a different approach, but they seem to be refusing to do so.
I don't understand it, but my company still does business with VeriSign after all the unethical crap they've pulled (SiteFinder, misleading renewal notices sent to non-customers, etc.). I suppose I shouldn't be surprised since coporate America is at best amoral.
For the only reason that verisign controls the '.' zone via the root servers. The .cx and .museum servers DOES NOT HAVE THE ABILITY TO REDIRECT ALL REQUESTS FOR ANY ADDRESS TO THEIR SERVICE!
People who used Verisign's Web-based domain name search got their domains hijacked more often than not. It happened to my stepbrother, along with a number of other people I know. The sleazeballs didn't even *try* to make it look legitimate: from lookup to hijack took around a dozen hours.
As my friend in the Army said: "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action".
Veritas delenda est.
How would your users know or care?
Hint: All the .com, etc domains will resolve just fine with almost all the alternate-TLD providers.
It's just that if they enter a .geek address they'll get a website instead of a SiteFinder or an Internent Explorer Search page.
Don't tell me your users actually depend on such features!
You see my friend there is this little internal group at every company that seems to have the ear of the suits that sign the checks (well, order someone else to sign the checks). You may think that influential group is you, the IT department. After all you department alone has more years of education and intelligence among its members than all the other departments combined. You'd be wrong though. Who has the ear of the suits? Marketing. And if Marketing says no then no matter how well you know your job and how neurotic they may be you still do what they say.
Based on some research I see that the key contributors to ISC BIND are also involved in a commercial DNS offering through a company called Nominum. Nominum guys claim to be the key active contributors to BIND and at the same time are saying that BIND is insecure and doesnt perform as well as their commercial version. Shouldnt ISC be doing something about this doublespeak. I think it is akin to using public office for personal gains. but maybe its just me.
Also as a side effect of Verisign's bullshit, spam filters for Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, (and probably a bunch of other services/filters) were fubared.
My guess is that the filters checked to see if the return domain was valid/invalid and with Verisign not returning NXDOMAIN, the spam was deemed valid mail and made it's way into my INBOXES. The result is that I lost two very valid e-mail address as a result, one of which I paid for.
During the height of it, I was getting ~20-75 spam per day...
Read the report. This is specifically and cogently explained
washingtonpost.com first reported on the ICANN Site Finder report last Friday (July 9). Read the story here.
This whole incident shows that we need more diversity in DNS servers. We don't need the U.N., we don't need ICANN. We need the market. There is nothing to stop any private organization from running its own DNS systems. Competition should help solve the outrageous prices from ICANN. Because of the single organization choke point nature of the present DNS system, it attracts governmental attention as a potential censorship tool. That is why the U.N. is sniffing around. We need so many diverse DNS organizations that no one can control it!
Actually, thats not technically correct.
cx could redirect *.cx
museum could redirect *.museum