Pressure from ICANN, which has certain de facto regulatory powers over the Internet’s domain name system due to its contracts with firms including VeriSign, instructed the company to turn off Site Finder to reduce the chance of Internet security being breached. VeriSign reluctantly agreed, although it is considering its options
Site Finder intercepts requests for non-existent and misspelled internet domains in the .com and .net namespaces and, in the case of HTTP, returns a revenue-generating search engine rather than an error message.
VeriSign had been given a deadline of 6pm US Pacific time on Saturday to comply; failure would have forced ICANN to enforce VeriSign’s contractual obligations.
Opposition to Site Finder from the Internet community was almost uniform. Online forums and mailing lists have been filled with the comments of those shocked at VeriSign’s move and bemoaning the technical problems they say it causes.
ICANN said formal complaints had been received from the Internet Society, auDA (.au), AFNIC (.fr), Public Interest Registry (.org), Melbourne IT, Register.com, ICANN’s domain registrar’s constituency, and Cigref (a French association).
People are also upset that there is no way of choosing not to use Site Finder. Anyone who visits a .com domain, and who doesn’t know how to hack their local DNS to evade it, agrees to Site Finder’s terms of use and privacy policy whether they like it or not.
There are wider political and economic issues at stake. The outcome of the Site Finder debate could help decide whether ICANN is suitably equipped to manage the DNS, and whether VeriSign is a responsible custodian for .com and .net.
However, ICANN has promised that it will try to cut the red tape VeriSign needs to wade through before it can offer a non-stability-endangering registry service.
This could help VeriSign’s time-to-market with other services in future. The company has for well over two years been fighting with ICANN and competing firms for the right to launch its controversial Waiting List Service (WLS).
WLS, which will launch, barring legal action, before the end of the month, sees VeriSign’s registry division monopolize the currently competitive market for expiring .com and .net domain name registrations, while making competition easier at the registrar level.
This article was based on material originally published by ComputerWire.
