The Security and Stability Advisory Committee of ICANN, which overseas domain registration and stuff like that, is soliciting the comments of “interested parties” regarding Veri$ign’s recent antics.
Not only is the letter a good summary of what V$ did, and the problems it causes, but it has an e-mail address you vent into (though, one would hope, in a persuasive, not abusive, fashion).
(via BoingBoing)
UPDATE: Swell. They’re putting cookies on your machine when you go to their “Oops, you goofed, so you wanna buy this domain?” page. That’s twenty million cookies thrown out there a day, keeping track of what domains folks are trying to get to. Think that might end up affecting some pricing somewhere, someday? “But we’re doing it to improve life for our users.” Sh’yeah, right. What unbelievable gall.
A fine analogy from GoDaddy,which also plans to sue:
Have you ever needed to ask for directions while you were driving? Let’s say you stopped to ask a trusted authority, like a police officer. You’d expect that officer to be honest, right? Wouldn’t you expect him or her to provide you a safe, direct route to where you needed to go? I sure would.
But what if that officer instead misdirected you to a shopping mall? A shopping mall, it turns out, that actually paid the officer for every sale that resulted? That would be an abuse of the police officer’s authority. It would be capitalizing on your misfortune.
We believe that’s what VeriSign is doing with its “Site Finder” marketing scheme. We believe that it is once again abusing the power to oversee all .com and .net domains it was granted by the U.S. government.
Amen.