North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Verisign's public opinion play

  • From: Howard C. Berkowitz
  • Date: Tue Oct 07 09:24:51 2003 
At 8:13 AM -0400 10/7/03, Kee Hinckley wrote:

At 10:27 AM +0100 10/7/03, [email protected] wrote:

 >I think this list may be a very good choice of where to construct

such 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.
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.
True. But even if it gives some warning to Verisign, the very openness of the process contrasts with the way they did things -- and, if made clear, could be newsworthy. Individuals speaking to the press, Congress, Homeland Security, etc., need not give early warning.


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.
Exactly. The most fundamental problem of education here is that the Internet is more than the Web, even for nontechnical users. I'm certainly not privy to Verisign's business plans, but Sitefinder seems to have an inherent assumption that Web browsing is all anyone wants to do.

Even staying with the Web, there may well be ways the Verisign-style TLD wildcard could carry supplemental information that doesn't break existing software but could carry optional redirection information that could work with such things as content distribution or failover, yet not break anything. I freely admit that I am not a DNS designer but have an operational-level understanding; if I do make design claims, it's in routing and closely related management. I do have a few thoughts.

Perhaps a lifetime supply of "Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept" T-shirts might be commissioned by Verisign.


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.
--

:-) there WAS a "cash cow" in an old Nortel commercial; maybe we should see if, like myself, she's an ex-Nortel employee that could join the effort. Ah, corporate speak...I wasn't laid off, or even downsized or rightsized. My boss (a great person) sadly call me to tell me, in Approved Nortelspeak, that I had been "optimized". Great flashback to George Orwell.