ICANN Draws A Line In The Sand For VeriSign
from the about-time dept
Jon writes “ICANN has decided not to wait for the meeting on October 7th and have issued VeriSign an ultimatum. VeriSign is to shut down SiteFinder and restore the .com and .net registries by 6:00 pm PDT on October 4th, or else. The next 36 hours could be very interesting.” Looks like someone finally woke up and read all those articles saying “well, this shows just how little power ICANN really has” and felt offended. It certainly took them long enough to get around to this. At first it was, “this is bad, you should stop.” Now there’s the “no, really, this time we mean it.” Next time will they really, really mean it? It will be interesting to see whether or not VeriSign backs down, or if ICANN actually has to take this to court. UPDATE: VeriSign has caved, though, they’re not happy about it.
Comments on “ICANN Draws A Line In The Sand For VeriSign”
I think this may be affecting Email too.....
I accidently sent an Email to a non existant domain, and never received a bounce message.
So I nslookup’ed the domain and it returned a Verisign server IP.
I WHOIS’d the domain and found that it hadn’t been registered.
So does this mean that this Versign business means that Email won’t even bounce anymore?!
Re: Will break anti-spam too
This means that some anti-spam measure will break to – like checking that mail is being sent from an existing domain…..
Re: I think this may be affecting Email too.....
Apparently, it does indeed effect email.
Some people were worried that now VeriSign basically gets to keep a collection of misaddressed emails and do whatever they want with them. They say (and it’s probably true) that they have no use to keep such messages – but just the fact that it’s possible is a bad thing.
Prediction: Verisign will politely decline
My prediction is that Verisign will politely decline ICANN’s “request” and suggest that further study is needed before they terminate a commercial product.
We shall see.
Christopher
New Registry Manager
Verisign has violated the trust placed in them and the resulting consequence should be their removal from that position of trust.
I think that a new non-profit organization should be created to manage the .com and .net registries, and that task should be taken away from Verisign. Domain registration fees should cover the cost of such an organization.
I think the big problem would be the hand-over of the registry database from Verisign to the new authority. Their incompetence and/or willful negligence could create a mess.
SiteFinder Benefit
With all of the talk about the problems caused by SiteFinder, there is a benefit:
I noticed that when a visitor hits my web site when coming from SiteFinder, the Referer HTTP header shows me the mistyped URL that originally sent the visitor to SiteFinder. I can now generate a list of common mistypings of my domain name, and if my web site were anything important I could register those names before Verisign or someone else hijacks my traffic.