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[IP] VeriSign responds with arrogance to Site Finder critics -- Dan Gillmor



VeriSign responds with arrogance to Site Finder critics

By Dan Gillmor
Mercury News Technology Columnist

News and views, culled and edited from my online eJournal (www.dangillmor.com/blog):

VeriSign's bad attitude: Domain-name giant VeriSign, which controls the ``.com'' and ``.net'' databases, has infuriated some of the Internet's most savvy technologists for a unilateral change to a key part of the Net. The Mountain View company's response, with one exception, has been as arrogant as its initial action.

Several weeks ago, VeriSign launched Site Finder, a system that took users who typed non-existent ``.com'' or ``.net'' Web address into their browsers to a VeriSign-owned site. Previously, such mistypings had resulted either in error messages or, if users were using America Online or Microsoft browsers, to those companies' search pages.

Site Finder's one potentially useful feature was to suggest pages the users might actually want. But if they weren't what people were looking for, VeriSign offered a listing of advertiser-sponsored sites.

This was a potential gold mine for VeriSign -- and an abuse of a monopoly.

Key people in the technical Net community were outraged. They said VeriSign's move interfered with some vital functions of the Net and reduced its stability.

After first blowing off a call by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to pull Site Finder down, VeriSign did just that. ICANN is the organization responsible for seeing that the domain-name system, and its unhappiness with the way VeriSign was misusing its ownership of the databases was a rare display of independence from what had been a mostly toothless body.

But Monday, in a news conference, VeriSign basically denied having done anything untoward. The company insisted it was doing us all a favor and that ICANN really had no power to intervene. VeriSign also all but vowed to put the system back online as soon as it felt like it. Now there's contrition.

VeriSign officials insisted there had been no impact on stability. (That's not what a panel of experts reporting to ICANN found.)

VeriSign also downplayed the anti-spam problems it caused. Some anti-spam solutions refuse to send mail when the sender's address is fake; Site Finder essentially turned all phony ``.com'' and ``.net'' domains into real ones. This was real harm. (Microsoft's and AOL's re-direction of users, while equally greedy, didn't affect the core infrastructure the way Site Finder did.)

VeriSign also noted, correctly, that other holders of domain databases can and have done roughly the same thing. But ``.com'' is the mother lode of the addressing system. VeriSign was plainly misusing its monopoly.

In Monday's news conference, VeriSign executive Rusty Lewis called the situation a test for the Net -- and said the infrastructure itself was at risk if his company couldn't ``innovate'' this way. The implicit threat: Let us do what we want with our monopoly power or we won't invest in upgrading the infrastructure.

VeriSign has already won the key part of this war. It has persuaded credulous journalists to call Site Finder a ``service'' instead of what it truly is, a misuse of monopoly power.

But if ICANN truly doesn't have any authority here, the future is fairly grim. Companies like VeriSign are misusing their choke points, because there's big money to be made in doing so. They shouldn't be permitted to do this.

Do-not-call, maybe: It's worth cheering a federal appeals court's ruling Tuesday to revive the telemarketing do-not-call registry. But even if this decision holds up on further appeal, it won't be the end of the discussion.

First of all, as annoying as the telemarketers may be, they have at least an arguable First Amendment beef with the current law. It's full of loopholes and completely exempts calls from charities, survey researchers, insurance companies and political campaigns, among others.

A do-not-call list should start with no exceptions. People should then be free to add ``it's-OK-to-call'' categories for themselves.

Still, the telemarketers who are fighting the list are, as usual, missing the point. We want them to leave us alone. Why won't they take ``No!'' for an answer?

Dan Gillmor's column appears each Sunday and Wednesday. Visit Dan's online column, eJournal (<http://www.dangillmor.com/blog>www.dangillmor.com/blog). E-mail <mailto:dgillmor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>dgillmor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; phone (408) 920-5016; fax (408) 920-5917.




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