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Verisign's DNS Wildcard Intrusion

 
I am hopeful that some progress is being made to have the Verisign's DNS 
Wildcard implementation reversed for all of the valid reasons outlined in the 
various ICANN committtee reports, IAB reports and NANOG forum discussions.  The 
degree of concensus from all over the the Internet on the serious issue is 
remarkable.
 
Verisign fairly obviously implemented this without notice or peer review 
because they knew it could not pass objective scrutiny.
 
My feeling is that ICANN should be hitting them on additional parallel paths 
involving more distinct parts ot the organization.  So far, ICANN has twice 
asked for the service to be shutdown.  Two committees (SSAC and ALAC) have 
issues negative reports also calling for the calling for the removal of the 
wildcards.
 
I think a strong case can be made for involving the Committee on Conflicts of 
Interest as well.  Verisign has injected istelf into the infrastructure of the 
Internet in multiple conflicting roles including:

*       .com & .net TLD Operator
*       advisor to various steering committees (technical and non-technical)
*       registrar
*       search engine operator
*       certificate issuing body
*       etc.

Some of these roles are overtly commercial (the Sitefinder search engine and 
registration businesses) relying, leveraging and benefiting from roles that are 
designed to support what is effectively a "Public Trust".  This is prime 
information for the Committee on Conflicts of Interest.
 
I read yesterday that due to this "forced" wildcard redirection, the volume of 
Internet traffic reaching Verisign has gone up by more than 500 percent.  This 
will directly translate into higher referal placement and advertising revenues. 
 Further detailed analyses of the change in Versign's traffic patterns are 
available at the links below:

                http://www.circleid.com/article/272_0_1_0_C/
                
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=verisign.com

An excellent commentary is also available in this O'Reilly interview with Paul 
Vixie:

                http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/09/22/vixie.html

If the Committee on Conflicts of Interest is not curently looking into this 
matter may I request that they be notified and hopefully they will conduct 
their own detailed investigation.  I have no contacts there, so perhaps as a 
start, this message could be forwarded.
 
Brian Angus