Published Oct 3, 2003
Back in the Stone Age of the Internet, the only company you could register a .com, .net or .org domain name with was Network Solutions. Their bureaucracy was byzantine, they were slow to act, and they were expensive, but they were the only act in town.
After other companies were allowed to “sell” domain names, Network Solutions was eventually bought by Verisign, which updated the services provided somewhat but did nothing to make NetSol as fast, cheap or competent as other registrars. Thus, NetSol and Verisign lost business to upstarts like GoDaddy, OpenSRS and Gandi.
On September 15, in an effort to get more business for themselves, Verisign introduced SiteFinder. The way the Internet has worked in the past is that, if you attempt to contact an Internet host at a domain name that is not registered, you receive an error message; this is true not just for the Web, but for other services like mail, Web services, etc.. So, if you, say, mis-spell a domain name, you get an error message and can correct your error. Verisign changed this: now if you mis-spell a domain name ending in .com, .net or .org, you get a Web page suggesting you buy the domain name from Verisign. Inconveniently enough, this Web page is sent not only for requests using the protocol for serving Web pages (HTTP) but also those for e-mail, direct connections between servers, etc; and let’s not even get into the fact that more than just Web pages are served using HTTP. Nope, you get the Web page whether you need it or not.
Now, unsurprisingly, this breaks a lot of things around the Web — a lot of programmers assumed, reasonably, that if their programs tried to contact a server at an unregistered domain name, they’d get no response or an error. This is no longer true, of course. So things go kablooie. It’s kind of equivalent to AT&T turning off the classic “the number you dialed does not exist” recording and instead sending you a fax on how to buy a phone number every time you misdialed it. Might be useful to people who misdialed using their fax, but that horrible fax shriek gives everybody using a telephone a headache.
The group that administers the registrars for the internet domain name system, ICAAN, was understandably put off by SiteFinder. After a few weeks of back and forth, ICANN has released a letter telling Verisign to turn off Site Finder or else. And it’s a good letter, too:
“Based on the information currently available to us, it appears that these changes have had a substantial adverse effect on the core operation of the DNS, on the stability of the Internet, and on the relevant domains, and may have additional adverse effects in the future.”
“[T]the only prudent course of action consistent with ICANN’s coordination mission is to insist that VeriSign suspend these changes pending further evaluation and study”
“In addition, our review of the .com and .net registry agreements between ICANN and VeriSign leads us to the conclusion that VeriSign’s unilateral and unannounced changes to the operation of the .com and .net Top Level Domains are not consistent with material provisions of both agreements.”
And so forth. It’s a good read. Go ICANN!