The internet overseer directed the president, board and staff to confirm with the Internet Architecture Board its interpretation of the standards governing the use of wildcards in the DNS.
In the meantime, it resolved, no new wildcards should be introduced to any top level domains, and any material changes in registry services should be carried out in a deliberate fashion, with appropriate notice and opportunity for community review, discussion and consensus building.
The resolutions come in the wake of the controversy over Verisign’s introduction of its Site Finder service last September, which intercepted misspelled domain name lookups in .com and .net and, in cases where a browser was making the request, sent users to a page of links and advertising, rather than an error message.
Verisign pulled the service, but is still duking it out in court with ICANN over the service.
Other highlights of the meeting, according to ICANN, include progress on the rollout of IPv6, the acknowledgement of AfriNIC, an emerging African regional internet address registry, and the creation of an advisory group on the use of internationalized domain names.
