[wildcard-comments] Verisign Overstepped Bounds
Thanks to ICANN for stepping in and stopping (if only temporarily) this wildcard "service" by Verisign. I spent an entire weekend with a new domain name trying to decide if my registrar or my server was at fault when I could not get a domain name to come up. Normally, when you are waiting the standard amount of time for a domain name to appear, you simply get an error if the changes have not gone through yet. Having this "service" come up was so unexpected, and intrusive, I thought my domain name had been hijacked. I got confusing, unexpected answers when doing look-ups, pings and traceroutes. I wasted several hours of time thinking my BIND configs were wrong, my server was damaged, or my registrar had falsely sold me a domain name when it really belonged to Verisign. At one point, the registration info lookup was correct, but the site still did not show up. I couldn't tell if I had misconfigured Apache or what was going on. How was I supposed to debug it when Big Brother Verisign was willing to step in and show me something it found more appropriate. URLs should remain UNIVERSAL and not under the commercial whims of a company. There are numerous legitimate ways to make money without trying to drive traffic to one of their registered sites because someone mistypes a URL! How many people will unwittingly mistype an address and because they did not get a real error and because they find links to click, think the URL wasn't real? And who is Verisign to decide which page they should be sent to. I use Safari and when I mistype an address, I don't get a "search page," I get an error which makes me look at what I typed and helps me debug errors on my DNS servers. It's one thing when the people who do not control the domain names (AOL, Microsoft, SBC) set up a "search page." I don't like it, but since they do not control the extensions, they have to get an error before they forward an Internet user. What Verisign did and wants to do is not a service, but a misuse of power for purely commercial gain. Even if they don't start selling positioning on the "search page" and making money the way Google and other search engines do, they still get an endless number of page hits to show off their name when everyone else on the Internet has to work for page clicks. That is a repugnant abuse of authority. I don't believe Verisign should be allowed to continue the "service" and, in fact, I believe ICANN should suggest a more distributed system that would remove so much control from one company. I also hope ICANN makes suggestions for better standardization. I'm all glad that Verisign and others view this as a legitimate way to "innovate," but just imagine if one of the major phone carriers stopped giving you an error message when a number was disconnected, but instead forwarded you to a sales person or a recorded sales pitch! What if the USPS decided that instead of returning misaddressed packages, they would simply forward them to whomever they believed someone wanted the letter to go to? Please control these people! There are millions of ways to make money legitimately over the Internet without hijacking the URL system.
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