Issues and Controversy
There was a storm of controversy among network operators and competing domain registrars, particularly on the influential NANOG and ICANN mailing lists, some of whom asserted:
- that the redirection was contrary to the proper operation of the DNS, ICANN policy, and the Internet architecture in general;
- that VeriSign breached its trust with the Internet community by using technical architecture for marketing purposes;
- that the redirection broke various RFCs and disrupts existing Internet services, such as e-mail relay and filtering (spam filters were not able to detect the validity of domain names);
- that the redirection amounted to typosquatting where the unregistered domain being resolved is a spelling mistake for a famous registered domain;
- that VeriSign abused its technical control over the .com and .net domains by exerting a de facto monopoly control;
- that VeriSign may have been in breach of its contracts for running the .com and .net domains;
- that the Site Finder service assumed that all DNS traffic was caused by Web clients, ignoring the fact that DNS is used by other applications such as network printer drivers, FTP software and dedicated communications applications. If users of these applications accidentally entered a wrong host name, instead of a meaningful "host not found" error they would get a "request timed out" error, making it look like the server exists but is not responding. No statement by VeriSign in support of Site Finder even acknowledged the existence of DNS traffic not caused by web clients, although they published implementation details which mentioned this traffic.
- that Site Finder contained an EULA which stated that the user accepts the terms by using the service--but since mistyping an address automatically caused the service to be used, users could not refuse to accept the terms.
Others were concerned that the Site Finder service was written entirely in English and therefore was not accessible by non-English speakers.
The Internet Architecture Board composed a document detailing many of the technical arguments against registry-level wildcards; this was used by ICANN as part of its supporting arguments for its action.
Read more about this topic: Site Finder
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