|
North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Verisign vs. ICANN
> ... > Unfortunately, SiteFinder did not have such a destructive effect as we > had all wanted it to have. > ... that apparently depends on what you wanted and what you consider destructive. to me, as a domain holder under .COM, the damage was latent, coming in the form of "unacceptable business risk". as long as i know that my competitors would have to actually register "nearby" names in order to steal business from me, then i know (a) their costs are linear with my risk, and (b) i can find out what they're doing and perhaps even who they're paying to do it. in the presence of a wildcard and paid advertising, (a) no longer holds and there is no way to do (b). if sitefinder returns, i'd expect to have to find a new parent domain, who has no wildcard-like keyword system, just for risk management reasons. some domain holders might prefer to manage this risk by paying verisign extra money to get all the nearby keywords, but i'd consider this blackmail and i'd rebrand my offerings out of .COM and .NET, and i expect that many other domain holders would feel (and do) the same. ultimately i'd expect domain registration fees in wildcard-free TLDs to cost more than domain registration fees in wildcard-containing TLDs. also, to me, as a domain holder under .com who uses my domain for more than just a web site, i can't tolerate the lack of RCODE=3 when a "nearby" name is used by mistake. verisign promised not to use the connections for anything nefarious, but they are not a public-benefit corporation and if they thought that the best way to return value to their shareholders was to keyword-search e-mail that was sent to them by mistake, then they would be stupid NOT to do so. (this has been called a strong argument for all TLD registries to be required to be public-benefit corporations... foxes guarding chicken houses, and so on.) > So while SideFinder was not as destructive as we might have thought > or hoped, ... i wasn't hoping for anything in particular. but sitefinder was incredibly damaging, and its return would mark a sharp uptick in my risk management costs, and there's no way you could say it wasn't "destructive" based simply on your local network traffic analysis. simply put, i would have chosen a different TLD if i'd known that wildcard processing was going to occur, and i do not recognize verisign's right to unilaterally change the terms under which my domain's delegation data is served.
|