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WHAT DOES VERISIGN'S SITE FINDER DO?

New York, NY September 17, 2003 (ICB TOLL FREE NEWS) Much hoopla has exploded over the last few days over VeriSign's new Site Finder self-service, which takes domain name typos and redirects them to pages that profit VeriSign.

As reported by VeriSign and clarified in Circle ID, .com and .net domains are mistyped approximately 20 million times daily.

The changes were made after a post to NANOG's mail list titled Change to .com/.net behavior. You can follow the thread here. With posts like "Verisign changes violates RFC2821", "Where will Verisign stop?" and "What *are* they smoking?", it makes for interesting reading. (NANOG, for those who don't know, is the North American Network Operators Group which provides a forum for the exchange of technical information, and promotes discussion of implementation issues that require community cooperation. These are technical people who know what they're talking about.)

Paul Vixie, head of the Internet Software Consortium (ISC) - a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to developing and maintaining production quality Open Source reference implementations of core Internet protocols - writes in Circle ID "Reported impacts include lost e-mail, inability to filter spam coming from forged domains, and concern that the IANA's reservations for single-letter domain names are no longer being honored."

Also follow ICANNWatch's VeriSign Typo Squats thread for valuable pundit feedback.

Trademark attorney John Berryhill reveals, for example, "The Sitefinder page is also generated for (a) domain names with no nameservers, (b) domain names in the redemption grace period (RGP) and (c) domain names on registrar hold. The names may indeed to be registered to someone, and that someone might very well object to the use of their name by Verisign, along the same lines as the register.com parking page claim.

The fact that RGP names are included provides extremely valuable intelligence to a few insiders at Verisign. They are in a position to know, with certainty, the traffic levels on domain names which are soon to be released. In conjunction with the wait-list service, this information is a gold mine.

The fact that Verisign is resolving on-hold names also frustrates reliance on the way things have historically worked. Take UDRP-cancelled domain names, for example. Bodacious-tatas.com was cancelled in a UDRP proceeding. To prevent resolution of that domain name, the complainant filed a lawsuit in India, where lawsuits move slowly enough to permanently keep a domain name on ice. Despite these efforts, Verisign is now earning pay-per-click revenue on the domain, and Verisign will be the only party to be able to earn revenue from this domain name for the foreseeable future.

Verisign will, of course, obtain John Zuccarini's revenue stream in the event that the court handling the Zuccarini case orders his domain names to be pulled out of the root. Again, nice timing."

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