Month: October 2003

The SecSAC meeting on Sitefinder in Washington DC is about to begin.General Meeting Information ｷ Agenda ｷ WebcastComments can be sent to secsac-comment@icann.org.

Verisign’s latest spin goes like this:

ICANN caved under the pressure from some in the Internet community for whom this is a technology-religion issue about whether the Internet should be used for these purposes.For this vocal minority, resentment lingers at the very fact that the Internet is used for commercial purpose, which ignores the fact that it’s a critical part of our economy.

That’s, of course, outrageous nonsense. What Verisign attempts to do is to throw out services that are being provided at the network’s edges by abusing its government-granted stewardship role for .com and .net.The objection here is not about commercial use of the Internet: It’s about keeping the net’s architecture open for commerce. It’s about keeping an architecture which enables different players to compete by providing innovative and better services to customers.Verisign’s sitefinder, however, is no such service: The only “innovation” here is to change the net’s architecture in a way which makes it impossible for other players to compete with Verisign.Time for a re-bid?

The latest exchange of letters between ICANN and Verisign is now available from ICANN’s web site.In response to ICANN’s pressure last Friday, Verisign’s Rusty Lewis accuses ICANN of a violation of the Registry Agreement as well as an anti-competitive interference with VeriSign’s existing contractual and other advantageous business relationships. Threatens Lewis: VeriSign fully intends to hold ICANN accountable for the damages caused by its improper actions.In a second letter, also dated 3 October, Lewis complains about lacking neutrality in ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee, and about lack of opportunity to debunk some of the misconceptions currently being forwarded. In a letter from Monday, Twomey responds. He rejects Verisign’s concerns about the SecSAC and tomorrow’s agenda, and suggests that SecSAC should hold a second meeting two weeks later or at such a time as VeriSign is ready to state its full technical position. Verisign is also formally requested to release its testing data from before, during and after the Service Change and to do so well in advance of the Second Meeting.

ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee page now has detailed information about the agenda of tomorrow’s meeting. The meeting will be webcast; remote participants will need to have realplayer installed.

Two interesting postings from the nanog list: Owen DeLong writes to the Washington Post’s ombudsman and offers detailed comments on David McGuire’s October 3 article; William A. Simpson writes to the New York Times and explains what’s not in Elizabeth Olson’s report.This shows that, while Sitefinder is bad for average users, a lot of spin is currently emanating from Verisign, and needs to be busted.

Seems like I missed most of the final showdown of Episode I of the wildcard wars today. Here’s the wrap-up.In a letter to Verisign (advisory here), ICANN has demanded that Verisign shut down sitefinder by 6 pm PDT tomorrow, until open technical issues are resolved. At the same time, the GNSO is requested to work out a procedure for the introduction of new registry-level services by 15 January 2004.See also: Commentary by Chris Ambler; discussion at ICANNwatch; discussion at Slashdot; reactions at CircleID. In response, Verisign has announced that it will temporarily shut down sitefinder (it seems like this step has not yet been implemented, though). It’s remarkable that Verisign spokesman Tom Galvin is now quoted characterizing Sitefinder as a non-registry service.See also: More ICANNwatch discussion; Chris Ambler; Verisign press release.

Andersenccenture puts Verisign in charge of electronic voting, and everyone around has the same association.Wendy Seltzer: What’s next, ballot-box wildcards?Ross Rader: The great thing is that if voters type in the wrong vote, Verisign has the technology to point them in the right direction.Martin Schwimmer: VeriSign announces VoteFinder Service.

Verisign has set up a Technical Review Panel that is chartered to look at implementation issues, to determine what enhancements could be made to improve the service, and to report the observed implementation issues to VeriSign along with any data supporting such issues. The committee is chaired by GNSO chair and SecSAC member Bruce Tonkin (Melbourne IT; conflict of interest statement; Melbourne IT letter to ICANN).This committee looks like another attempt by Verisign to distract people into discussions about implementation details of the Sitefinder service (there’s certainly room for improvement), in order to avoid the architectural concerns (which can only be addressed by dropping the service entirely).See also: Ross Rader’s take of the issue.

The registrars’ constituency has sent a resolution to Paul Twomey. Key points:

• ICANN should immediately require that VeriSign suspends [Sitefinder] and returns a “NXDOMAIN” response for zone file entries that do not exist;
• registry services should be compatible with the relevant agreements, and the security and stability of the DNS;
• gTLD registries should be required to follow a predetermined process when introducing new services in the future; that process should in particular investigate contractual questions, and security and stability implications.

An interesting comment concerning the Redemption Grace Period was sent to the ALAC’s forum list yesterday. The story: A registrant doesn’t get renewal notices from his registrar (Network Solutions) — but, after expiry, there is an offer to use the Redemption Grace Period to get the domain name back, for $ 150 instead of the usual $ 30. Apparently, an attempt to transfer the domain name away from NSI had failed earlier on.Update: A similar story is told in this message to Dave Farber’s IP list. This particular registrant seems to believe that the domain name in question was successfully transferred away from NSI prior to expiry, though.