[wildcard-comments] A vote against the wildcard DNS

[simon farnsworth <simon.farnsworth@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Sir,

While I can understand Verisign's wish to use their control of .com and 
.net to make money, I would like to object to the use of a wildcard DNS 
entry to do so. This objection is not based on technical concerns, which 
 I wish to leave to more qualified individuals, but on business concerns.

During the period when Sitefinder was operating in a wildcard fashion, I 
took the effort to read and review their Terms of Service and their 
Privacy Policy. Having done so, I decided that I was not prepared to 
accept either the Terms of Service or the Privacy Policy, and therefore 
contacted Verisign, informing them that I had rejected their Terms of 
Service, and therefore did not wish to receive the Sitefinder service 
unless the conditions could be changed.

Verisign's response was unacceptable; they told me that I could not stop 
using their service despite my express wish not to do so. Further, they 
were not prepared to consider amending their terms to my satisfaction, 
and they would count any use, intended or otherwise, of their service as 
acceptance of the published terms, despite my explicit refusal to accept 
those terms.

I do not feel that it is reasonable practice to refuse to stop providing 
a service I have not asked for under conditions that I find 
unacceptable; however, I have no way to avoid using the Sitefinder 
service when a wildcard DNS record is used.

Further, some of my Internet applications, including my web browser, had 
Sitefinder-alike functionality that was broken by the wildcard record; 
the applications detected an NXDOMAIN DNS result, and redirected me to a 
search page. Sitefinder prevented this from working.

I hope that you will take this view into account,

Simon Farnsworth