[wildcard-comments] On Sitefinder

[Tyler Berry <tylerjberry@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Since VeriSign has announced the resumption of the SiteFinder 
"service", I feel it's an appropriate time to comment.

As a "normal user", whom VeriSign claims should be thrilled about 
SiteFinder, I find it frankly idiotic.

VeriSign seems to be operating under the premise that's widespread 
nowadays: that the WWW is equivalent to the Internet.  On the contrary, 
I use DNS constantly for a number of things utterly unrelated to the 
Web, the least of which is e-mail; many of those things rely on a 
proper NXDOMAIN in the correct circumstances. Furthermore, any mistyped 
domain name can cause packets to be redirected to VeriSign; there is no 
guarantee that their "VeriSign Mail Rejector" on port 25, for example, 
is not harvesting e-mail addresses, and no guarantee that it won't do 
exactly that in the future.

I urge ICANN to take action to stop this ill-conceived destabilization 
of our RFC-standardized DNS network.