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Verisign Recommended to Keep .com & .net

Posted by samzenpus on from the it's-mine-now dept.

An Anonymous SAIC Employee writes "The 'independent' company hired by ICANN to advise them on who should run the .com and .net registry has recommended that Verisign (fact sheet) should be chosen to continue to run the registry. Is it any surprise? Telcordia was owned by SAIC (Fact Sheet) during the time the study was conducted. SAIC bought Telcordia (fact sheet) (then Bellcore) in Nov. 1997 and sold it March 15, 2005. Network Solutions was bought by SAIC in 1995 and sold in 2000. Also, Telcordia worked with Verisign on the ENUM project. Is the fox guarding the hen house?"

3 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Depends on what their contract says by dmoen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I wouldn't mind this, if Verisign's contract was amended to prohibit domain-typo hijacking, and more generally, to require them to remain compatible and RFC compliant. And I would want those same contract provisions regardless of who runs .com and .net.

    Doug Moen

    --
    I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
  2. Sitefinder by Uber+Banker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Isn't hijacking every and any unclaimed URL for company profit while providing no public service in an organisation whose very objective is a public service reason enough?

  3. Why is this still centralized? by MrDomino · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I honestly find it hard to believe that a single entity can maintain control over such a large part of the Internet for so long a time; in the net's early days, a centralized domain registry might have been acceptable, being that it was a small thing and the overhead to implement anything more advanced would've outweighed the benefits. Now, though, with the Internet the size it is, I honestly think that something better needs to be in place: get rid of this central-domain-registry crap. Whoever's in charge of it--Verisign, Microsoft, even Google--is going to profiteer to some extent, simply because that is what companies do.

    If you ask my opinion, a decentralized system would make much more sense here. Store addresses in a Kademlia network or something; allow anybody to register a domain name, and it'll propagate as it's accessed. With a PGP-like trust system implemented, there need not be a central registry anywhere. The only way to prevent abuse of such a large monopoly is to prevent any single entity from controlling it, and the only way to do that is to decentralize the process.