Domain Registration Related News
ICANN to Verisign: Thou shalt not redirect
July 2004
Over the weekend ICANN's Security and Stability
Advisory Committee released a report condemning
VeriSign's SiteFinder service and recommends it
never be used in the public realm again. VeriSign
caused a ruckus when they launched their
SiteFinder service that redirected unregistered
domains to a paid advertising service, and
suspended SiteFinder after threats from ICANN. The
committee came down hard on VeriSign saying the
company unleashed an untested service, without
public comment, that interfered with services that
expected routine DNS name error codes.
The basic conclusion of the 78-page report: "Don't
do this," [committee chairman Steve] Crocker said.
"Don't redirect uninstantiated domain names in the
big, public registries," he said. "It creates all
kinds of problems, and it's not the right thing to
do."
Among the report's eight findings was that
SiteFinder "violated fundamental Internet
engineering principles" by mingling different
architectural layers of the Internet. SiteFinder
targeted HTTP requests, but because it was
operated at the level of the DNS (Domain Name
System), it also affected other Internet
protocols, Crocker said.
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