North American Network Operators Group
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Re: ICANN asks VeriSign to pull redirect service

  • From: Jack Bates
  • Date: Tue Sep 23 10:29:03 2003 
John Dvorak wrote:

and the response from Russell Lewis:
http://www.icann.org/correspondence/lewis-to-twomey-21sep03.htm
<explenative deleted>! The Internet works perfectly fine for years. They make a change which is confirmed to disrupt service. Instead of restoring the stable state while conducting a review, they feel that they must keep the service as is? This is the problem with a for-profit company. They are keeping it to make money. The truth is that no one would complain about reverting back to the stable condition which everyone has lived with for years. They are complaining now. In addition, the IAB has already published a report that pointed out the various problems. Much discussion has existed on the topic across all the major networking/spam/security mailing lists. It is obvious that they have broken a lot of things. To not revert is to push their own needs; ie. profit.

This quote is also interesting:

"This was done after many months of testing and analysis and in compliance with
all applicable technical standards"
The system is technically within standards. The purpose of the IAB is not only to watch standards, but to also understand common use of the network. Many standards have been changed to reflect common use. A good section of RFC's are about common use. As networks implement standards, there are always incompatibilities and extra's that are added in. As deployment reaches general use, it is one of the duties of the IAB to recognize that such utilization is in place and what the overall effect on the Internet is.

In this case, IAB did state that the wildcard use did break commonly used mechanisms deployed on the Internet, even if it was technically within the standard. This is one reason that it was recommended that the users of the tld be allowed to decide on if a wildcard is appropriate. For .museum, it is appropriate. It's even in their ICANN agreements. For com and net, no such precedent was ever set and complaints from the users of said tld are being ignored. Common use was broken.

-Jack