Telepocalypse

Why VeriSign's SiteFinder is unwanted innovation

Few can have failed to notice the hubbub over Verisign’s SiteFinder “service”, which returns a DNS record pointing to their pay-per-click search engine for every unresolved DNS lookup.

There have been many good write-ups on the technical reasons why this is a bad idea. It breaks a number of existing systems.

More fundamentally, it violates the end-to-end principle. The end points should have the ability to determine the appropriate action associated with a lookup of a non-existent domain. This is alluded to in the article at CircleID:

VeriSign justifies SiteFinder by calling it a “service” and says it helps users by giving them a friendly search page instead of a non-existent domain message. Some modern Internet browsers such as Internet Explorer see this non-existent error message and instead return their own similar search page. If an Internet Explorer user doesn’t want to see Microsoft’s default search page they could install different plug-ins to handle the DNS error, or the user could choose a different browser. But in either case, the user has an option.

Perhaps ICANN need to consider a clause in their next contract with (hopefully) the replacement for VeriSign stating that the TLD operator must do nothing that violates or damages the end-to-end nature of the Internet?