Less than half a year after
Verisign was forced to remove wildcards for .com and .net domains and
rumblings of their intention to reinstate the dodgy service are being heard again. Verisign was coerced by ICANN to stop the sitefinder service - which was deemed by many to be an unfair use of Verisign's unique position as the owner of the TLD's .com and .net to generate extra advertising revenue from users arriving at the sitefinder website after mistyping .com and .net domain names.
Now in a bizarre a and somewhat ironic twist of fate,
Verisign is suing ICANN saying 'ICANN overstepped its contractual authority and improperly attempted to regulate VeriSign's business in violation of its charter and its agreements with VeriSign.'. Smacks of the pot calling the kettle black eh?
EDIT: The story goes on and on... just read over on /. that a lawsuit is now being filed against BOTH ICANN and Verisign for their plans to introduce a Wait List Service (basically a back-ordering service so you can pay to have a domain name watched and as soon as it expires it's registered in your name). Why on earth people find this proposal anti-competitive is beyond me... a number of other companies (123-reg, godaddy and they're just the two registrars I use!) already provide this service...
Back on October 23rd 2003, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) hit Verisign with a document entitled Architectural Concerns on the Use of DNS Wildcards. The response by Verisign can be seen here:
VeriSign Responds to IAB Site Finder Commentary
The response very clearly outlines all of the arguments for and against Verisign using wildcards for .com and .net, although in places the arguments offered by Verisign are weak to say the least:
On the question of Language Tags or Localized error messages when a page is not found:
The IAB commentary notes that, prior to a wildcard A record in the .com and .net zones, web browsers displayed "page not found" in the local language of the user but now return an English language web page. The concern raised by this point is that the prior user experience of receiving a technical error response in a user's native language may be more useful than ah navigation aid web page in English. Note however that some of the most common web browsers, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer, already redirect the user to a web page that may not be in the user's preferred language when a "no such name" response is received.
The part that's laughable here is emboldened - Verisign appear to argue here that because Microsoft Internet Explorer and other web browsers redirect users to a web page, it's therefore ok for Verisign to do this.
This is ridiculous to say the least - to start with where a web browser redirects you as a user is ultimately controllable by you (or at least it should be, tell MS that). If you decide you don't want to be redirected to the page MSIE wants to redirect you to, fine, setup your personal firewall to block access to their redirection page.
There are some other arguments and it's worth a read if you're vaguely interested. I can't see Verisign getting away with setting up the sitefinder service again, too many people were up in arms last time (me included:P).
