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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."
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.
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
But ICANN is not much better. They have no accountability, refuse to reform, their meetings are basically junkets to somewhere expensive, and they try to gouge registrars for $15.8m for next year, double the previous years. Lets also not forget the fiasco that was the ICANN At Large, where the directors users voted in where quickly thrown out when they tried to represent user viewpoints.
Oh, and the too great an influence the US government has on ICANN.
The UN, through the ITU, assign all kinds of numbers, codes and callsigns. Did the world come to an end because the US had to paint "N" on the side of their airplanes?
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
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.
Don't feed the trolls... it's a badger campaign... only marginally better than a goatsx or gay niggers ones.
Unless we're talking about two different things, that's been around in bulk for a long time.
-- . . ramblin' . . .
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.
While I certainly think it is good that people are sceptical to ICANN, I think this issue is the wrong time to voice those concerns. As you yourself state in your blog - "Sitefinder is so bad that the fact that ICANN is using vigilante methods to combat Sitefinder might be overlooked in our emotional reactions to the situation."
Sitefinder was incredibly bad. I had scripts failing all over the place due to not being able to rely on DNS providing proper "host not found" answers any more. I'm sure I was not the only one.
While I agree that the report could've been better - the important thing in this case is to support ICANN. The enemy of my enemy is my friend - at least temporarily - and at least about this issue.
There is a proper time and place for criticism. This is not the proper time to criticise ICANN, in my opinion.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
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.
unprincipled and subjective condemnation of change on the net.
Huh? There's nothing subjective about the fact that looking up a non-existent domain name is supposed to return an Unknown Host error. I can think of plenty of applications that might rely on such a result code, spam-filtering being but one obvious example. Specs are specs.
ICANN didn't say that the specs are written permanently in stone - only that if one wants to change a spec, there are procedures that must be followed: public proposal, followed by peer review and discussion of the consequences being the big points. If the change is approved, then reasonable lead time needs to be given following final adoption of the new spec, so sysadmins have time to review their systems and update any affected code in preparation for the change.
Verisign did none of the above. They unilaterally and capriciously changed an important result code worldwide, with practically no notice given, and gave it no review whatsoever - not even internally. How else to explain doing it with email, which could easily have blown their own mail server off the net from the sheer volume of forged-header spam bouncing off non-existent recipient addresses? No tech ever really thought this one through (or if they did, they were ignored by BizDev/Marketing, which seems to me most likely).
Maybe ICANN is unprincipled, maybe not. But Verisign is unprincipled. Just because Peter's a jerk doesn't mean Paul's a saint. They might both be jerks. It's not a zero-sum game.
Lots of people have problems with ICANN, but that's a separate issue, unrelated to the fact that Verisign has proven itself unworthy of its station. Given that this lawsuit even exists, it proves that they (Verisign) haven't learned anything from all this, and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near top-level DNS servers.
I think Opennic should play especially well here, where they eagerly advertises it's .geek and .oss TLDs on the header of their home page.
All it'd take is a /. giving up on their ".com" and ".org" and advertising themselves as "slashdot.geek at opennic", and I bet a bunch of us would switch overnight. Enough IT guys switch, and then who cares about all those .Com[mercial] groups anyway.
Actually, telecomms standardization is the job of the ITU, which is part of the UN.
VeriSign has defended Site Finder by saying it offers a better way to handle nonexistent or misspelled domain names than the unhelpful error messages that some Web browsers currently provide.
Apparently VeriSign believes that DNS is only used for Web traffic, and/or that the Internet is only the Web.
That's why it's no use talking about advantages of disadvantages of their method - their method just makes no sense. DNS (their thing) works on an entirely different level than the Web, they can't know whether a request has anything to do with anyone's web browser at all. They show a page to people using web browsers and break everything else, that's just stupid.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
Well, I'm not a big fan of the capitalistic nature of registrars either -- I don't have to pay extra for a postal address or a phone number (they come free with buying a home and buying phone service, respectively), so why should I pay separately for a domain name, especially one that nobody else wants, like my name?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
enough IT guys switch, and then who cares about all those .Com[mercial] groups anyway.
All of my users?
Mod point free since 2001
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.
> The enemy of my enemy is my friend - at least temporarily - and at least about this issue.
Ah yes... that is the exact strategy that got us all kinds of nice things... like... we did get the Russians out of Afghanistan with help of our 'friends' there... too bad those same friends decided later it was a good idea to fly planes into buildings..
Sorry to pull in that bit of not so nice world history, but this way of reasoning is so amazingly short sighted and stupid, how much more proof of that do you need really??
Before you ever consider anyone a friend, look first what motive they have for being friendly to you right now..
You can have a temporary alliance with what is normally your enemy in order to fight a bigger, common enemy... but never ever regard such an alliance as 'friends', it is a big and often repeated historical mistake that time and again proves itself to be a really really serious mistake.
In other words... ICAN is on the same side as many of us are in this issue, well, good, but it won't change in any way what I think about them, the only way to change that is by actually addressing their internal problems.
who cares about all those .Com[mercial] groups anyway
... what, again?
Umm, it was google dot
Uh huh, yeah. Get your head out of your GeekPort and come back to the real world.
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
It's a good thing we live in a healthy capitalist environment where the market determines who succeeds -if we don't like Verisign, we just won't use it and they'll crash and burn.
Oh. Nevermind.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
More to the point, fixing problems with browsers is NOT THEIR JOB. It is the jobs of Microsoft, Apple, Netscape Communications Corporation, The Mozilla Organization and Mozilla Foundation, Opera Software, the KDE dev team, the Omni Group, Anderson Che, and just possibly Michael Grobe of the University of Kansas, along with doubtless a few others I've missed. Even if (for the sake of arguement) all these folk I've listed are incompetent nitwits, that is not Verisign's problem.
The job of Verisign is to help keep things working on port 53, not to deal with the underhelpful responses of most client software that works on port 80 (thereby breaking every $%^&* port at once). Trying to help someone else with their job is all very well and good; I do it all the time with other local techs, as it's usually a learning opporunity... but I have to make sure I'm doing MY job right, first, or I'll get fired.
Now, if they want to expand the DNS error message from "not found", to "not found, do you want this instead?", they should propose the modification of RFC 1035 part 4, instead of just rewriting it on their own. (Or, they can write their own browser (or modify a few bits of GPLed code) and distribute it... at which point, they've undertaken another job do do at the same time. Either way, I'm happy.)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.