Verisign typo-squats

This is an interesting case.

One the one hand, Verisign is going against the de-facto use of the protocol in denying rejections being sent. They'll break a lot of software that relies on this.

On the other hand, serving up a search page is, by a very strict reading, within the protocol. You do not receive a rejection, but an actual response, even if it's not the response you expected. It wasn't the protocol that hijacked the response, it was you, who typed in the wrong URL (and hence the wrong domain name).

Were Verisign to return a "fuzzy" response, you can be assured that most browsers would use it to display their own search page, and monitize that traffic themselves. Obviously, Verisign is doing this for the revenue - and one can't fault them for that.

At the end of the day, the question, I think, will be: are there enough people upset at this to do something about it? Can anything be done directly? Probably not - Verisign owns the resolvers, and short of ICANN making them stop, they'll most likely go ahead.

However... what Verisign serves up should be deterministic in nature. As such, browsers could recognize that and interpret it however they want. If they see a Verisign-generated search page, they can ignore it and show their own. Verisign couldn't complain about this, because it is, for all intents and purposes, exactly what they're proposing to do, themselves.

Interesting times we live in.

--
Ambler On The Net [ambler.net]

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Choices?
by dmehus on Monday September 15 2003, @12:46PM (#12195)
User #3626 Info | http://doug.mehus.info/

Good points. However, I would prefer that domain names simply do not resolve and return the "unknown hostname" error, as this is the way it has always been. Further, what about existing web search engines that rely on DNS errors as one of the reasons for removing a site from its index on their next crawl? If a domain name expires, the search engine should be able to use that as an indicator to remove it from its index. If the site is "live", it can't.

If ICANN doesn't make them stop and chooses to amend the contract in favour of VeriSign (because Tina Dam did point out that a contractual revision would be required if revenue is involved), then this is one instance when I hope the intellectual property lobby and other businesses sue ICANN and VeriSign for typosquatting. :)

Cheers,
Doug
Doug Mehus http://doug.mehus.info/ [mehus.info]

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Choices? by cambler Monday September 15 2003, @01:01PM
- Re:Choices? by tlr Monday September 15 2003, @01:41PM
  - Re:Choices? by cambler Monday September 15 2003, @01:50PM
    - Re:Choices? by tlr Monday September 15 2003, @02:26PM
      - Re:Choices? by fnord Tuesday September 16 2003, @01:20PM
    - Re:Choices? by dmehus Monday September 15 2003, @02:34PM
- Re:Choices? by jimrutt Tuesday September 16 2003, @08:52AM
  - Re:Choices? by cambler Tuesday September 16 2003, @09:05AM
    - Re:Choices? by jimrutt Tuesday September 16 2003, @10:46AM
    - Re:Choices? by cambler Friday September 19 2003, @08:55PM
      - Re:Choices? by jimrutt Monday September 22 2003, @09:23AM
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