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Wednesday, October 1, 2003
Edition: City, Section: BUSINESS, Page 6-B
By Jim Stafford
Business Writer
Internet wanderers who lose their way along the World Wide Web have a
helpful new site to point them in the right direction, but it's an
unwelcome addition to many people who have an interest in the way the
virtual world operates.
The new service - or culprit, if you prefer - is the SiteFinder initiated
Sept. 15 by VeriSign Inc., of Mountain View, Calif., which just happens to
be the official registry for the .com and .net domains, where the Internet
addresses of much of the business world reside.
Users end up at VeriSign's SiteFinder when they try to visit a nonexistent
Web site. It offers users a search engine and suggestions as to where they
may want to go.
So what's the problem? Plenty, say VeriSign detractors. Its site is
intrusive and hijacks unsuspecting users, who before the SiteFinder was
implemented would have received an error message advising them that the
site for which they were searching did not exist.
In addition, it disrupts efforts by network administrators to filter spam
from nonexistent e-mail addresses and causes other problems that have
surfaced in the last couple of weeks.
More importantly, VeriSign is exploiting its monopoly position as
administrator of the popular .com and .net domains to drive business to
itself, said Oklahoma City computer consultant Mike Andrews.
"This is an enormous trust, and it is a trust," said Andrews, who serves
as a network administrator for a state agency. "The crucial point here is
that VeriSign is a steward, not an owner, and that it has a contract to
operate the .net and .com top-level domains for the ICANN (the Internet
Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers) and the U.S. Commerce Department.
"It was taken by the steward against the wishes of the owner to increase
the revenue of the steward at the expense of the people and organizations
who collectively make up the Internet."
If nothing else, VeriSign broke a tradition of cooperation among the
people who make the Internet operate efficiently, said David Farber,
distinguished career professor of computer science and public policy at
Carnegie Mellon University.
"The main issue is this is not the way the Web works," Farber said. "My
favorite example is that this would be like your local telephone company
quietly announcing that from now on you put the area code at the end. It
may work locally, but it's going to be chaos if you have each company
doing a different thing; you aren't going to be able to talk anymore."
VeriSign makes no apologies for its action. It has even issued a news
release touting the number of visitors - even if they arrived by mistake -
that SiteFinder has attracted during its short existence.
VeriSign spokesman Tom Galvin said Monday that the site has attracted
about 150 million visitors in its first two weeks of operation. And about
40 million of those have taken advantage of its search engine. He said it
was implemented after extensive research into what Internet users wanted most.
"Anyone who is sending e-mail today or Web browsing today would understand
that the Internet is working just as well as it did two weeks ago," he
said. "There are some technical issues that we are working with the
Internet community to resolve."
Andrews and Farber counter that the Internet is not working as it did
before VeriSign's action, especially in the ability of network
administrators to filter unwanted e-mail by determining the validity of a
sender's e-mail address.
"As a result, Internet service providers will have to weaken their spam
filters, and the consequence to the consumers will be additional junk mail
in their mailboxes," Andrews said.
VeriSign's Galvin said the company introduced SiteFinder in an effort to
bring innovation to the Internet.
"What we're really talking about is a discussion of the future of the
Internet, will it continue to innovate or have we reached a state where we
say the Internet world is flat and we don't need to explore any more," he
said. "We hope that is not the case."
Certainly, Galvin won't get an argument about its impact on the future of
the Internet. Farber said VeriSign's action will only encourage other
companies to follow the same path.
"This has pretty dramatic problems, and if you get away with it other
people are going to do equivalent things which could be considerably more
destabilizing," Farber said. "You don't do things like this. There is a
process for vetting ideas. They are not any old company. They are in a
privileged position and when you are in that privileged position you have
to be more careful. If everybody goes around doing whatever they feel like
doing without coordinating, the net is going to collapse eventually."
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Farber [mailto:dave@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, September 29, 2003 8:38 PM
To: Jim Stafford
Subject: Re: Questions about VeriSign action
I can talk Tuesday at 10 am to noon edt and after 2 pm edt. Call 412 726 9889
At 02:24 PM 9/29/2003, you wrote:
>Hello, Mr. Farber:
>
>I am a business news writer at The Oklahoman who is seeking some comment
>about the Verisign action regarding domain searches, etc. We received a
>call here at the newspaper from a systems administrator with the State
>Department of Transportation who was upset over the Verisign action. He
>was especially upset because he said he could no longer filter spam by
>determining if it was coming from a fake address or not and that is a big
>deal. I saw your comments in an Associated Press story, and am asking you
>to comment for our local story. I have a few questions about this. I
>admit that I'm not real knowledgeable about the impact that this has on
>consumers, so that's my first question:
>
>1) How does the Verisign actions affect consumers who may just be Internet
>users?
>
>2) How does this Versign action change the way misspelled domain names
>were handled in the past?
>
>3 How does it affect administrators, especially people like the guy I
>referred to who somehow use e-mail addresses to filter spam?
> What is happening there?
>
>4 Also, someone sent me a link to an article that said the "Verisign"
>search site "leaks data" ... what does that mean and how sinister is it?
>
>5 What other repercussions could this have industry wide? I saw your
>comment that things are "breaking."
>
>
>
>Thank you for considering these questions. I want to be able to relate it
>to Oklahomans, but need to know how it affects us. If you prefer, I can
>call you with these questions. I tried calling once, but got no answer.
>
>
>Jim Stafford
>
>
>
>
>Jim Stafford
>Business News Reporter
>The Daily Oklahoman
>(405) 475-3310