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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Verisign's public opinion play
At 10:27 AM +0100 10/7/03, [email protected] wrote: I have to disagree. Verisign is playing this game with considerable political savvy. Disparate responses of varying quality do not get the media's attention, and they play right into Verisign's hands, because they have characterized this as a dispute between a respectable, secure and reliable company against a bunch of scattered techies. I don't think that sending those letters and writing those articles does any harm per se, however I think the focus should be in providing technical *and marketing* ammunition to ICANN and focusing our defense there. A single organization pushing a message over and over is more likely to get press attention. Note also that we are at a considerable disadvantage in that our discussions of what approach to take our taking place in public forums ("Hi, Verisign"). Nothing like advance warning.>I think this list may be a very good choice of where to constructsuch a response.Are you being paid by Verisign? A "constructed" response is the worst thing we could do. Everyone should write their own responses in their own words based on their own experiences or their own skills and knowledge. That's the only way to demonstrate that Verisign was wrong, wrong, wrong. The other thing I think would help is to paint the picture in terms that the general public can understand. Verisign can do this because the "benefit" is something that web users understand. Type something wrong--get a search page. Most of the drawbacks are much more technical. I have an idea in this space, I'll post it later today. The other thing we should focus on is process. Verisign is claiming that we fight innovation and commercialization of the internet (pretty wacko, given the business we are in). The fact of the matter is that there are established procedures for innovating the core technology of the internet, and they didn't follow them. We need to push the fact that they didn't just break the internet, they broke the rules, and this "innocent company being held back by techies" ploy is a bunch of garbage. I'm not sure if it helps in this argument to rehash all the other problems with Verisign (like, how they managed to take the guaranteed cash cow of domain registration and manage it so insecurely and with such poor customer service that we all ran quickly to other registrars). Certainly it would be good to counter their public image, but it probably should be done separately from this issue. -- Kee Hinckley http://www.messagefire.com/ Next Generation Spam Defense http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate everyone else's.
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