DrBacchus' Journal

Irony, thy name is Verisign

Seems that Verisign is suing ICANN for doing their job. Pretty ironic really.

As I remember it, ICANN was created in the first place because InterNIC/Verisign/NetworkSolutions was abusing the power that they had. So, this time around, Verisign again abused their power by putting the misnamed "Sitefinder" "service" in place.

For those of you who missed it, the basics of this "service" were that if you mistyped a domain name, you'd end up on Verisign's web site.

Of course, there's slightly more to it than that, because the internet is more than just the web. So if you mistyped an email address, that email would end up going to Verisign too. That strikes me as a tad of a security problem, to say the least.

So ICANN stepped in, did their job, and shut down this service, which was causing breakage across the Internet.

So now Verisign is suing ICANN.

And it's even more ironic, because the only reason Verisign even still has a company is that ICANN granted them the rights to manage the .com TLD in the last reshuffle. And so Verisign is, in a very real sense, biting the hand that feeds it.

I sincerly hope that ICANN sees that the right thing to do here is to simply hand .com to some other company that can manage it responsibly, since Verisign has not only shown that they cannot, but has shown no respect for the organization that they are supposed to answer to, as well as for the Internet standards that they are supposed to be upholding.

Morons.

Posted by rbowen at February 26, 2004 09:02 PM | TrackBack