Why it's time to rein in ICANN

The article is in my opinion far from "insightful and well-written". It attempts to place ICANN in a very unfavorable light by ignoring the almost universal opposition to sitefinder in the Internet community and that several multimillion dollar lawsuits that were being launched. ICANN acted in response to this building opposition.

An example of the clear bias here is the following comment

"Consumers are far from complaining. VeriSign says that in its first week of operation, Site Finder's search tool was used more than 11 million times. And lost Web users used the "Did you mean?" function, which lists actual Web sites similar to the misspelled Web address, 1.6 million times to get to their intended online destination."

Apart from only taking the point of view of Verisign the fact that someone used sitefinder does not mean they supported it or went to their intended online destination. In fact I used sitefinder to find out how Verisign's actions related to cyber-squatting. The process is simple

1) Find a famous brand and a domain involving this brand that was not registered.

2) Type in the domain into my browser to trigger sitefinder.

3) Look for competitive products or services to the brand in question among the paid links.

The business purpose of sitefinder was to redirect consumers to the paid links on the sitefinder page. This does not look much different to me than a cyber-squatter who registers a domain involving a famous brand and redirects this domain to a pay per click search engine. The consumer experience in both cases is almost identical.

One can continue with numerous examples of why sitefinder was just a bad idea.

There have been many legitimate criticisms of ICANN over the years but to rein in Verisign over sitefinder is not one of them.

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