Because we care can

Having rolled over for ICANN briefly, Veri$ign is coming back out with all guns blazing, and has announced it will break the Internet again in 15 to 30 days. It will do this by reinserting the wildcard into domain searches, so that V$’s DNS servers basically hijack all .com and .net domains except those that are actually registered. Queries for the hijacked domains will go to the V$ “SiteMinder” pages, where V$ offers to help you find what you’re looking for — and offers to help you buy that misspelled domain (from them, of course) — and, oh, yeah, sells advertising to target the 20 million people a day who inadvertently go there.

That confused some antispam filters and other network utilities, a side effect that VeriSign downplayed on Wednesday by arguing that Site Finder’s benefits to end users–a search screen instead of an error message–outweighed the costs to network administrators.

In their opinion. Which is enhanced by the profit they anticipate making from it.

“One of the segments of the community that has not been looked at in this whole issue, in my opinion, is the user community,” VeriSign Vice President Chuck Gomes said. “They’re very relevant.”

And profitable, too.

In a presentation, VeriSign said that 35 companies were confidentially briefed about Site Finder before its debut and they reported “no issues” or problems before its launch on Sept. 15.

Because, after all, 35 companies can fully test something that substantially changes the nature of the Internet.

Its own expert group–including the chief technology officers of Brightmail and Morgan Stanley–reviewed Site Finder and decided that most issues were “minor or inconvenient,” VeriSign said.

And this was their decision to make because …?

Before resuming Site Finder, VeriSign said it would address specific criticisms by adding foreign language support to Site Finder and tweaking the way e-mail to nonexistent domains worked.

Son of a bitch! We forgot there were a bunch of folks out there who don’t speak English! How the hell can we make money off of them if we don’t have foreign language support?!

And, damn, we really frelled our servers by screwing with the Internet and having all invalidly addressed domains in e-mail come flooding into us! We’d better have those tech guys downstairs fix that! Wonder why our 35 expert companies didn’t warn us about that ahead of time?

VeriSign’s Matt Larson, who spoke at the meeting organized by the Security and Stability Advisory Committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), said a poll paid for by his company showed 84 percent of U.S. citizens surveyed had a “preference” in favor of Site Finder. […] But Gomes and Larson, under intense questioning from ICANN committee members, refused to release details about the methodology of the survey such as the questions asked and the responses received. “The actual feedback we got directly from doing the survey is proprietary information,” Larson said.

Trust us. That’s what it said. C’mon, trust us. We’re Veri$ign.

And when ICANN insisted on knowing what the poll actually said — since, after all, it was presented as proof that people like SiteMinder, and therefore ICANN’s worries were ill-founded?

Crocker’s questions, along with queries from Ram Mohan of Afilias, a domain name registrar, prompted an angry reaction from VeriSign representatives.
Gomes said: “I’m utterly clueless about how what we’ve been talking about for the last few minutes has to do with security and stability”–the ICANN committee’s mandate.

Clueless. Remember, you heard it here, first.

Larson suggested that “you guys don’t think consumers are relevant” and that committee members were unduly focused on the travails of network operators affected by the Site Finder changes.
“We’re going to have to stop this discussion and turn to a different venue,” Larson said.

We have a proprietary poll of a bunch of people that supports us, but we won’t let you see it. If you question that, then you’re a bunch of poopy-heads, and probably a threat to Homeland Security, and we’re going to go home now, so there!

Amazing.