Verisign Sues ICANN Over SiteFinder 395
camusflage writes "Yahoo's running a story about VeriSign suing ICANN for holding up Sitefinder. Choice quote from VeriSign: 'This brazen attempt by ICANN to assume 'regulatory power' over VeriSign's business is a serious abuse of ICANN's technical coordination function.'"
:rolleyes: (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice and misleading explanation right there. We're talking about a 'search engine' that impacts any internet application querying a non-existent domain. Once again, the "THE INTERNET IS ONLY THE WEB" mindset that low-grade tech journalism seems to be stuck in is preventing people from realizing the destructive nature of something as profound as adding a wildcard to major TLDs.
Errmm... Last I checked, regulating internet infrastructure with regards to assigned names and numbers is ICANN's job. Anything less than a "brazen attempt" and they would be failing at enforcing the RFCs and other regulations they've been entrusted to enforce. Since when do Verisign's business interests trump this?
At least they respond to complains with action, instead of stonewalling anyone who disagrees with them, as Verisign so eagerly did when the SiteFinder controversy first broke.
Screw Verisign. I've seen plenty of companies with brazen, my-way-or-the-highway attitudes, but this one is entrusted with managing a major international public resource, and have been caught with their pants down abusing that trust. To whine like this is a sign of just how out of step Verisign really is. Frankly, they deserve to have all authority over the root servers taken away from them before they do more harm in their quest for profits.
I don't get it (Score:1, Insightful)
My prediction... (Score:5, Insightful)
My bets are on the lawyers...with 100 to 1 against the people...
Do they really not get it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lose Verisign (Score:4, Insightful)
SiteFinder and non-geek disconnect (Score:5, Insightful)
Even in this article, which is reasonably technically sophisticated, Verisign's SiteFinder is almost invariably described in terms which suggest it was just a helpful service for lost souls (people who'd typed a wrong URL) instead of being recognized for what it is, an aggressive land grab and a ridiculous abuse of monopoly power.
It's not like newspapers are in VeriSign's pockets or anything. Why is that so few of them seem to understand how bad what VeriSign did is?
Problems like this are forseeable (Score:3, Insightful)
This is where the problem is. Why is a business running these domain names? That seems like a conflict of interest to me. There needs to be non business regulatory commitees that run it. The issue certainly can't be finding money to do it.
Even though its a little annoying that Verisign wants to show their sitefinder, as a business, they have every right to do it.
This discussion reminds me of something on slashdot a while ago that I can't find that was something like "10 common misconceptions about the internet". The whole point was that the internet is just a network of computers, its that simple. This simplicity will vanish before our eyes if we have businesses running it.
Missing the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:SiteFinder and non-geek disconnect (Score:5, Insightful)
Hello, rest of the world here (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, I'm sorry. I guess not.
Why is this still an issue!? I don't understand! (Score:5, Insightful)
They have abused their position, they are completely untrustworthy, and they are now suing the very body that (I would assume) allowed them to have this power in the first place.
I want Verisign's power of DNS revoked: Now. What is the inherent barrier? Why are they still allowed to intentionally fuck over the globe?
Does no one have the revoking power? Is inertia on their side? What is going on that gives them this power?
Re:A True Battle of Evils (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Thats funny.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Verisign is a dinosaur. Time to take them down. They're both incompetent and dishonest.
Damn ICANN! (Score:5, Insightful)
Methinks this would be somewhat similar to the US Government making all roads not privately owned lead to a government business.
I know, that sounds REALLY stupid - the government would NEVER do that. It's moronic to even think of something like that - but, essentially, is that not exactly what Verisign tried to do?
This also stinks of anti-competative monopolistic activity - as there are other 'site-finding' services out there. Such as Google, AltaVista, etc al... Yet Verisign would be the _only_ company able to perform a service utilizing this method - as they would be illegally tapping into property they do not own - unregistered domain names.
Stupid ICANN, what were they thinking! They act like they have "responsibility for Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions."
audacious ta-tas (Score:5, Insightful)
"They say ev'rything can be replaced,
Yet ev'ry distance is not near.
So I remember ev'ry face
Of ev'ry man who put me here.
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east.
Any day now, any day now,
I shall be released."
- Bob Dylan, "I Shall Be Released" [bobdylan.com]
Re:ICANN will fold to Verisign... (Score:5, Insightful)
a US-gov-controlled internet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Having said that, I don't think making it a gov't institution would solve anything. There have been many situations where gov't regulation has helped us, but when has the gov't taken over a previously private role and done a better job?
Although the free market can't solve every problem, this seems like a case where elegant legislation might make the difference. Now, Verisign has a monopoly on .com domain registration. But why should they? Shouldn't that position be open for bidding? Or have term limits? If a company only has a short window of time in which it controls domain registration, or if there are repercussions for abusing its power, that company will likely be cautious about enacting drastic infrastructure changes of the type Verisign is implementing.
(By the way, people often use the $ as a derogatory marker for an entity they don't like, such as Micro$oft or the Church of $cientology, so why not Veri$ign as well?)
Re:Fighting back? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A True Battle of Evils (Score:4, Insightful)
> such as making ICANN into a government regulatory
> agency similar to the FCC. Mind you, that might be
> a good thing.
So you are looking forward to being required to get a license for your Web site and a permit for your mail server? I'm sure Verisign will be ready to expedite the application process for their customers.
Re:Problems like this are forseeable (Score:3, Insightful)
ICANN believes this is a misuse of the power entrusted to VeriSign. I'd have to agree with them. If I mis-type a website, I want a "site not found" error or something useful, not a verisign web page.
Copy of letter just e-mailed to Verisign CEO (Score:5, Insightful)
I was dismayed to hear that Verisign has launched a lawsuit against ICANN over the termination of the Sitefinder service.
I realise that I am only one person, but hopefully you will receive sufficient numbers of messages in similar vein that you will reconsider this action. It can have only one outcome, and this will not be good for Verisign or its shareholders.
ICANN is a regulatory body specifically tasked with ensuring that the cooperative standards which embody the Internet are administered for the common good.
Verisign, being in a unique position of trust, introduced a service that rendered the entire domain name mechanism broken.
Although the service provided may possibly have been useful for web users, the Internet is most emphatically not just the web. By ensuring that nonexistent domain name lookups succeeded, Verisign circumvented the error handling provisions of a large number of IP-based software products.
You will have noticed at the time that the immediate response from many ISPs was to immediately place local detection and blocking of Sitefinder, in order to restore correct functionality to these applications in accordance with accepted practice. This caused a considerable amount of effort and cost to the businesses concerned, and is therefore a legitimate target for regulation, and the regulatory body in question was the ICANN.
To attempt to sue a regulatory body for doing its job correctly and effectively is, I am afraid, unlikely to show Verisign in a good light.
Again, I urge you to reconsider this action.
Yours,
Sean Ellis
Software Developer
--------
Page? What page? (Score:5, Insightful)
ICANN isn't claiming any such thing; all they're saying is you must administer DNS to the RFC specifications.
In fact, my guess is that ICANN doesn't care at all about siteminder.
Is it really that hard to understand?
I think nibbled to death by ducks is MUCH too kind (Score:3, Insightful)
Verisign hijacked people's computers because they typed invalid names, and "helped" them by advertising themselves while disabling computers that depended on the standard that Verisign unilaterally and capriciously broke. Verisign then has the gall to sue the organization that forced them to obey their previously agreed-upon standards. Isn't this like Nixon suing the Watergate special prosecutor for preventing him from "modifying" the government from a variant of a representative democracy to a dictatorship? After all, the prosecutor made him obey the law and wait through a long, drawn-out process known as legislation. I guess it would have been much easier and quicker to allow the President to do what he wants without waiting for Congress to get around and pass a law, right?
Hello, Verisign, welcome to my foes list, you useless, talentless a**holes... Oh wait, you were there already, after you enabled the Charlie-Fox known as SiteFinder. My bad.
STUNNING! (Score:5, Insightful)
Verisign should lose all control & responsibility of any TLDs for this, it's just amazing that they could attempt to undermine internet infrastructure like this and then brazenly turn around and sue the regulators.
They have no shame, it's time to farm TLD administration out to people who are at least slightly rational.
I guessing 9 out of 10... (Score:1, Insightful)
I have. I sent a nasty-gram laying out why I think sitefinder is a bad idea. My threat was to move my domains to a different registrar. Hell little o'l me has four domains with networksolutions that's a decent bit of change they'll miss in the next two years.
Re:One argument they could use... (Score:5, Insightful)
They still return a 404 error, or at least, they're supposed to. Get Mozilla Firefox, download the Live HTTP headers extension, and you can verify this for yourself. Also, this is typically within a domain that does exist - it's just the page doesn't.
Or maybe a web domain speculator will buy up a domain name, and use that to forward you to their search engine. Verisign could argue they're doing something similar.
Ahh, but SiteFinder works even for domains that have NEVER existed. This means that Verisign is squatting on an almost-infinite number of domain combinations, which they haven't paid a cent for. As scummy and dispicable as webspammers are, this is scum and villany on a grand scale. Worse, it's scum and villany at a very low level - it doesn't just break HTTP, it breaks FTP, SMTP, and a host of other DNS-dependent protocols, AND it affects everyone running a DNS server by loading their cache tables with garbage.
Re:I'd would say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why do we need Verisign? (Score:2, Insightful)
You really believe total DNS mutiny would be preferable (read: more stable) than wildcards in two TLDs? I don't like Verisign's moneygrubbing wildcard plan either, but I'll take it over complete pollution and destabilization of an otherwise working system.
Note to VS: You know browsers are not the only network applications that *rely* on DNS. For the love of God, stop messing with it to make a quick and dirty buck.
Note to all: If we stop buying Verisign products, they will stop bothering us. Corporations exist only with customer revenue.
How long will it be... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, ICANN has been about as strong as weak toilet paper when it comes to enforcing the rules (e.g., forcing registrars to ensure the registry information is correct) so I don't think we'll see anything come out of this one [even though they stand to gain [financially] from it].
Re:You know.. I think I like Verisign better than (Score:5, Insightful)
I, on the other hand, like MS better than Verisign.
If I don't want to use IE, I [opera.com] don't [mozilla.org] have [konqueror.org] to [mozilla.com]. I am not forced to use their product or to see their ads if I choose differently.
Having a poor browser does not break any other Internet applications. This does.
Re:You know.. I think I like Verisign better than (Score:3, Insightful)
You're hitting the nail on the
In the case of Internet Explorer: when you type in a wronf URL, the browser cannot find it and decides to redirect you.
I dunno if you fully understand the scope of what's going here. This is so f*king wrong.
Apart from the obvious EXTREMELY SERIOUS technical issues, what bothers me most is that Verisign is in this way actually STEALING ( and make money on them through ad's
Well, I hardly ever post on
Ever tried OpenNIC [opennic.org] ?
Re:A True Battle of Evils (Score:4, Insightful)
<sarcasm>Why would you want the French government to control the Internet?</sarcasm>
Seriously, the Internet needs to be controlled by the UN or something like that.
Dynamic configuration (Score:1, Insightful)
Dynamic configuration COULD be designed. Every router acting in its own best interest, reassigning ips on the fly as networks come and go...
Much easier to suggest than implement. Worse on a public internet where you have to deal with script kiddies who will declare their own networks of several billion computers from time to time just to mess everyone else up.
Re:PETITION (hyperlink) (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems ICANN have contempt for their duty (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't seem to understand that they're only supposed to sell and administed a bunch of
I still can't figure out why they're so spectacularly misguided as to think that this service responsibility gives them the unilateral right to screw with the World's internet infrastructure, and sue the only regulatory body in place to stop their shenanigans.
Re:Working with... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, considering that the expression "nibbled to death by ducks" isn't anything new, I'd say not.
No, wait. If he's learning from Darl, then next thing we're going to see from Verisign is a lawsuit against Robert Campbell, J. Michael Straczynksi, and anyone else who hasn't paid $699 to use the expression...
How does Verisign get its role providing DNS? (Score:4, Insightful)
Its clear that Verisign is irresponsible and can be expected to keep trying to abuse its position running the GTLD servers for .com and .net.
As I understand it, ICANN delegated this role to Verisign, so ICANN ought to be able to take it away.
Can anyone explain the terms of the current delegation? Is there are contract that will expire in a few years? Did Verisign somehow acquire permanant rights?
Charter (Score:5, Insightful)
The mission of The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ("ICANN") is to coordinate, at the overall level, the global Internet's systems of unique identifiers, and in particular to ensure the stable and secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems. In particular, ICANN:
1. Coordinates the allocation and assignment of the three sets of unique identifiers for the Internet, which are
a. Domain names (forming a system referred to as "DNS");
b. Internet protocol ("IP") addresses and autonomous system ("AS") numbers; and
c. Protocol port and parameter numbers.
2. Coordinates the operation and evolution of the DNS root name server system.
3. Coordinates policy development reasonably and appropriately related to these technical functions.
From the Memorandum of Understanding with the U.S. Govt. establishing ICANN, Section II (Purpose), Part B (Purpose):
a. Establishment of policy for and direction of the allocation of IP number blocks;
b. Oversight of the operation of the authoritative root server system;
'nuff said.
By what it says here.... (Score:3, Insightful)
ICANN was originally established to assist in the transition of the Internet domain name system from one of a single domain name registrar to one with multiple companies competing to provide domain name registration services to Internet users "in a manner that will permit market mechanisms to support competition and consumer choice in the technical management of the [domain name system]." ICANN's ongoing role is to provide technical coordination of the Internet's domain name system by encouriging coordination among various constituent groups using the Internet.
I read a few things here:
1. Verisign acknowledges that ICANN serves in (a coordinating role of) the technical management of the DNS. Therefore, IMHO, it surely must acknowledge that ICANN has to act against the sitefinder service to protect that technical interest. The disadvantages have been clearly written out by lot's of experts in the field, ICANN simply gives them 1 voice - coordinates if you will.
2. Verisign acknowledges that ICANN should 'support consumer choice'. What Verisign has done clearly states a breach of consumer choice (having 99.99999999999% of the domain names in for example the
In short: by Verisign's own words, ICANN is doing something right.
So let's sue Verisign (Score:5, Insightful)
Since most non-tech people seem to think that the Internet is the web, let's take the web angle in a very simple way.
I have a web site. A potential customer mistypes my domain name in his browser.
1. Without site finder he gets an error and realizes he has mistyped the address, so he corrects the error and comes to my site.
2. With site finder, he comes to a confusing Verisign page. From there on, who knows where he will get. Probably not to my site. Versisgn is unfairly taking business from me.
And what about email? Badly addressed email is replied to with a bounce message. What happens when it goes to Verisign?
Refining on these ideas, I'm sure domain owners with good lawyers could start a class action suit against Verisign.
(I'm glad that in my country, domain names are managed by a monopolistic body [switch.ch] controlled by the state and some universities. It is cheap, fast, simple and efficient, and there is not a single advertisement when registering or managing domain names)
Re:Do they really not get it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, and it's currently a draw.
Re::rolleyes: (Score:3, Insightful)
Or did you guys ever get rid of that?
Besides, the way you run the setup, don't we have to trust you to resolve all our com/net/org names too? Would be great one day to wake up to paypal.com resolving to an IP controlled by a script kiddy?
Sitefinder breaks otehr search engines (Score:5, Insightful)
Verisign should have their contract yanked, as soon as possible. No ifs and or buts.
Re:A True Battle of Evils (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, how would you determine who gets a permit? Doesn't pass spam? Ok, how about sending unpopular political views or "dangerous" information.
It might seem nice but I think the best bet is to work on the technical aspects of the problem rather than legislating ourselves into smaller cages. Just a thought . . .
Let Verisign win and reactivate sitefinder... (Score:5, Insightful)
technical coordination function (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing in the DNS RFCs suggests that a compliant DNS server can return arbitrarily chosen answers in response to a DNS question regarding an unknown domain. In fact, doing so clearly violates RFC 1035 section 4.1.1, which specifies that the response code 3 ("name error", also known as NXDOMAIN) should be returned for that case.
How can Verisign personnel seriously claim that there is nothing wrong with SiteFinder?
In my opinion, Verisign already breached their contract to operate the registry when they instituted SiteFinder the first time, and ICANN and the Commerce Department should have started a process to award a new contract to a different registry operator. The wholesale fee of $6/domain/year that Verisign gets is ridiculously large to begin with, which makes it seem even more unprofessional that they deliberately sabotage the registry operation to try to make even more money.
The outcome doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way VeriSign can win this is to specify as "damages" for winning that they get to operate
-Todd
Non-Existant .com & .net names (Score:5, Insightful)
Since we have just bankrupted Verisign, then a legitamate company can take over their job of controlling the GTLD servers for
Re:a US-gov-controlled internet? (Score:5, Insightful)
As opposed to private transport, where none of the costs are hidden? Pretty much every form of transit, public, private, mass, or individual, suffers from the same problem. You think the cost of mass transit is hidden in the taxes we pay? Have you any idea how incredibly hugely more everybody pays to support the highway system? Cars are the most highly subsidized form of transit in existence outside of space travel. Similarly, all those airports we build cost a hell of a lot of money - most of which usually comes from public bonds. There are very few transport systems that are actually privately funded - practically all are publicly funded in one way or another (I would say oceangoing transit has been kept mostly private, but historically many ships have been partially funded by governments, especially lately, and modern seaport facilities cost huge amounts of money, meaning most of those are largely or partially publicly funded).
So yes, public transit does hide its true cost behind a tax structure to some extent, but so does pretty much every form of private transit (how many sidewalks and bikepaths do you know of that were paid for by private companies?).
Incorrect DNS responses for non-port-80: Bad (Score:5, Insightful)
- If a customer's Port 80 web application sends Verisign a DNS request for a missing site, and Verisign responds with a pointer to Sitefinder, and the customer's application sends an HTTP:80 request to Sitefinder, and Sitefinder responds with a web search page, it's greedy and not correct, but mostly harmless and sometimes helpful.
- If a customer's Port 443 Secure Web application sends Verisign a DNS request for a missing site, and Verisign responds with a pointer to Sitefinder, and the customer's application sends Sitefinder a request, it's potentially a serious security breach (though not usually, because usually the connection fails before anything important gets sent.)
- If a customer's email application sends Verisign a DNS request for a missing site, and Verisign responds with a pointer to Sitefinder, and Sitefinder's email application rejects the connection, it's broken in ways that are mildly to seriously annoying.
- And if some other application (even HTTP on port!=80) that Sitefinder doesn't support sends Verisign a DNS request, and Verisign responds with a pointer to Sitefinder, that's badly broken.
If Verisign can't tell the difference between the applications which it helps and the applications it breaks, which they can't, they'd better not go breaking things, and if they break them they should be fired.Re:Incorrect DNS responses for non-port-80: Bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Also they really needed to fix their site for other port 80 stuff. Simply returning large html pages is broken if the client only does wap for example