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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.