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Verisign's Lawsuit Against ICANN Dismissed
emtboy9 writes "Internet domain name registry VeriSign just can't seem to convince anyone that redirecting misspelled Web addresses to its own site is a good thing. A federal district court judge on Thursday threw out VeriSign's legal arguments that ICANN's ban on this tactic amounted to a violation of U.S. antitrust law. VeriSign, which runs the master database for .com and .net addresses, had argued that its competitors had succeeded in stymying VeriSign's plans for its Site Finder service by providing advice to the board of directors of ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers."
emtboy9's writeup is not much of a writeup. It's word for word the first 3 paragraph of the article without giving CNet credit for it. That's kind of a no-no to me.
You can easily customize such actions in IE. Go to Tools|Internet Options|Advanced Under the Browsing section uncheck the "Show friendly HTTP error messages." Under search from address bar click the "Do Not search from the address bar" button.
Then you can have your return codes back the way you want.
we use I.E and if I type in a URL that doesn't work I get taken to msn search page, does that mean the server is down, doesn't exist or what?
Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced -> Search from the Address bar -> "Do not search from the Address bar" -> thank you; drive through
They're no longer together so its not really that big of a deal anymore. At the time there was no precedent for companies like Verisign and Net Sol, so they just went with the flow.
If it wasn't for that other company stepping in and purchasing net sol, they'd probably still be together.
Hell, verisign still owns a minority interest in net sol and its subsidiaries.
...Verisign essentially won a contract to maintain a couple of the most important top level domains for ICANN (on behalf of the rest of us). Verisign took that essentially as a grant of monopoly power over all unassigned domains in those TLD's, and thinks that it therefore has the right to point all requests for such unassigned domains to its own site.
ICANN then said to Verisign: "Oh no you don't. Your contract is just to maintain a couple of databases. You don't suddenly own the net." And so, predictably, Verisign went to court to plead it's so-called case. Just as predictably, they lost.
It's nice when things work out like they should.
No, they can't. The may interpret the law in a way that YOU don't agree with, but the can not and do not "make" their own laws. If, on appeal, a higher court disagrees with the lower courts decision, it'll get overturned. It happens all the freakin' time.
Why is it that the only time someone uses the term "Activist Judge" is when some neocon is whining that OHMYGOD that judge says QUEERS have the same rights as other PEOPLE?
Verisign caused a lot more damage than just to email. Any application that needs to determine the validity of a domain name broke. The solution, which was already being implemented in various places when Sitefinder went down, was to use a caching or forwarding nameserver locally and special-case the address of Sitefinder... make it look just like "no such domain" to any applications. Then if you're using a routing firewall you program it to NAT any other servers DNS requests to the root to go to one of your own DNS servers, and Sitefinder vanishes.
This would have indirectly lead to a benefit, because it would make it that much easier to switch to an alternate root by changing your own configuration in one place, or otherwise ignore other "cunning schemes" Verisign might come up with.
The National Science Foundation originally funded all registration services for IPs and Domains. They bid it out and NSI won it. At the time the net was largely US academic and R&D and fell within the aegis of the NSF.
.coop, .museum and .pro are even remotely viable.
When Stephen Wolff privatied the NSF backbone and uunet, sprint etc had an excuse to exist, Wolff simply overlooked the fact the domain/ip stuff was still in government control.
The original plans were to create lots of others NSI's. Postel in 96 wanted 300 new TLDS to compete with NSI; tradictionally the net solves problems of monopoly by the creation of additional resources, not regulation, but, the trademark attornies saw ICANN as a convenient stranglehold and combined with the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars big busines have paid for washington lobbyits to exert influence there is no real competion for NSI, jsut additional sales channels. Unless of course you think
It's unfortunate that todays decision, while highly regarded, asssits ICANN in it's feature creep; it's scope is supposed to be a narrow technical mandate, and they've prevented NSI from doing what dozens of other tlds have done for years.
TO find the real motivation behind this, and no it's not NXDOMAIN - follow the money.
Need Mercedes parts ?
If you get a domain wrong, the god damn browser should take you to google or whatever search engine you specified under some settings within your browser.
Yes, the browser should be able to do something like what you describe. MSIE does, and I'm pretty sure somewhere out there are Mozilla/Firefox extensions to do the same thing. It would be even better if the browser can do it in a configurable way - let you pick the search engine, let you turn the feature off if you want to see the error messages, and so on.
The big problem with SiteFinder is it's NOT the browser taking you to a search engine, it's a broken DNS implementation doing it. Unlike browsers, you can't just pick one that works the way you want it to. And if you happen to be isomg the net for something other than interactively surfing the Web, VeriSign's ploy can hurt you. Rather than that script giving you some kind of "host not found" if you have a typo, it decides VeriSign's server is the machine it's looking for.
What VeriSign was originally supposed to do was manage the .com, .net & .org domain extensions. In and of itself, that isn't a monopoly service, all they had to do was make sure registrars didn't double-dip on domain addresses and things like that. It wasn't until VeriSign bought Network Solutions, however, that a conflict of interest came up. *Then* VeriSign became both the manager of the gTLDs and it's own customer.
It's a funny quote from a movie not intended to be offensive [or even a genuine reference to sexuality at any level]. Basically I'm saying that working for them wasn't a pleasant experience, and I found many of their business practices to be less than what I would call ethical. Sorry for any confusion...
[This sig left intentionally blank.]
OTOH being able to buy stuff online is pretty handy, no?
Need Mercedes parts ?
If you get a domain wrong, the god damn browser should take you to google or whatever search engine you specified under some settings within your browser.
Its not like it would be that hard to do.
It is if Verisign returns a page which contains a code saying that the correct page has been found, but instead substitutes its own content (which is what it is doing).
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
While this is an inconvinience ( a "service" according to VeriSign, heh), this wasn't the major problem that a fundemental change to the top level DNS hierarchy was causing.
According to RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1), each response to an HTTP request is responded too with first a status code, then content. Therefore, all VeriSign had to do to fix the 404/502 problem would be to return all SiteFinder pages as status code 404. (Disclaimer: I am not aware if they actually did or not). If that was implemented, browsers could easily ignore SiteFinder while still displaying proper error codes.
The big problem is that DNS is not used just for HTTP, but also for most FTP, telnet, email, you name it. If it works over the Internet, chances are it locates a server to establish a TCP connection to using DNS. Now, realize that your Telnet client doesn't know or care what an HTTP error code 404 is because, hey, it's a telnet client, not a browser, coupled with the fact that the actual DNS system would never return an error code but would instead re-route all bogus queries to the SiteFinder webserver, which has no ports open except 80, and you can quickly see how "mistyped URL" went from "simple mistake" to "hundreds of 'Connection timed out: 500 seconds' " messages quickly.
Any mistyped e-mail address would make a mail server keep retrying to find "user@yhaoo.com" over and over, thinking the server was down, as opposed to it not existing.
Think of it as if instead of a busy signal, telephones would ring 8 times and connect you to directory assistance if you dialed a disconnected number by accident, with no way to tell until the operator answered. IF you where as dumb as a computer, you'd just keep trying, thinking it would eventually have to work.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?