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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
...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.
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 ?