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Keith Teare's Iconoclastic Take on the SiteFinder Report
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Since when does registering a domain require the registrant to support any, most, or all protocols some, most, or all of the time?
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[I saw the piece on CircleID first, so my comments are the same]
Security isn't an absolute concept -- it's a relative one.
I'm entirely happy with a system that would cost on the order of $6*(37)^60 per year (or more) to "break", just as I'd be happy with a $10 bicycle lock protecting a $500 bike that would cost $75,000 for an attacker to cut through. Indeed, I'd be happy to see someone go ahead and spend the money to prove Keith right. The fact that they don't proves that his point is invalid, as economics is part of the security equation. I'm sure Bruce Schneier [schneier.com] has made the same point on numerous occasions in his newsletters (that's where I'm sure I picked up the concept years ago), but it's a bit too late tonight for me to find a reference.
SiteFinder is bad for a large number of other reasons besides security, as one can read in the almost 20,000 petition signatures at Stop VeriSign DNS Abuse [whois.sc]. One reason that's important to people like myself who are concerned about competition is that VeriSign is getting those domains for free under their dream scenario, giving it an advantage solely due to it's monopoly. That's an abuse of its monopoly, and outside of the scope of the Registry agreement. As one person had noted, it would be like the company who was contracted to clean the highways decided to earn some extra money by putting up signs along the highway too, without authorization. SiteFinder is worse, because of all the cost-shifting it causes on third parties.
Another concern is the massive typosquatting that SiteFinder is taking advantage of, diluting the value of the PAYING domain registrants. Furthermore, because there is no WHOIS for those domains, under VeriSign's dream scenario, they'd not be liable under UDRP, etc. Since a lot of the damage is of the nature of "death by a thousand cuts" (i.e. $2/yr here, $1/yr there $0.06 yr elsewhere), the individual damage from each domain that is typosquatted on is small, but added up (on the order of 37^60), it becomes hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage to the worldwide community (i.e. enough traffic to vault SiteFinder into the top 20 internet sites in the world is a lot of typos). The non-zero price of domain registrations prevents a lot of typosquatting, because it would become uneconomic. As any economist will tell you, a lot of bad things can and will happen if something is made "free". "Limit"-case solutions can be ugly.
Keith is still listed on the board of directors of SnapNames [snapnames.com], which has an interest in keeping favourable relations with VeriSign, due to WLS [fightwls.com]. I remember the good old days of SnapNames and the WLS debate, when SnapNames employees were visiting my website almost everyday. I don't see many hits from them anymore, as they've really scaled back to a skeleton crew, and reduced their product offerings, as they take a beating from Pool.com, eNom, Namewinner and other competitors. RealNames was another disappointment. Join the winning team, Keith, against SiteFinder, as 3-strikes and you're out, and so far the count isn't looking too good. :)
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...take a look at Vint Cerf's response to Teare.
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Actually, the usage rates for BIZ are remarkably close to that of COM. You may not think COM is a good 'role model' for usage, but I did want to provide some facts for BIZ relative to COM.
This data comes from a recent (June/July 2004), independent study of both the BIZ and COM spaces. It was presented at last week's ICANN meeting in Malaysia.
In BIZ, 31% of all registered names resolve to discrete, websites with actual content. In COM this is 33%. In BIZ 17% of names are re-directed to another URL (i.e. the names are used to drive traffic). In COM this is 31%. In BIZ 20% of names resolve to a 'parked' (under construction) site. In COM this is 8%. Finally, in BIZ, 32% of names don't resolve at all. In COM this is 28%.
The key differences are that COM has a lot more re-directed names and a lot fewer parked names. We think this is due to large 'traffic generation' purchases in COM and, in the case of 'parked' names, to a number of BIZ customers who are earlier in their website development cycle.
In the context of the threads above, the 32% of BIZ names that don't resolve are the ones purchased defensively by 'protectors' (very few of these 32% are speculative names -- the study showed less than 1% of BIZ names are actively 'for sale').
While a 32% rate for non-resolving names is quite high, it is very common in most TLDs. The good news (for us) it that non-resolving names are declining over time as a percentage of all names.
The proportion of names that resolve to discrete, content-filled BIZ websites increased by 52% since we did a similar study 18 months ago. The other piece of good news is that almost all sites are used for commercial activity (i.e. there are extremely few 'personal' or 'non-commercial' sites).
Hope this is useful. Our conclusion is that BIZ is creating reasonable and increasing utility as a TLD.
Richard Tindal
Neulevel Registry
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Keith Teare's Iconoclastic Take on the SiteFinder Report