VeriSign sues ICANN over Sitefinder

This is the stupidest thing I’ve seen in a while. When VeriSign put up Sitefinder before, the uproar over all the stuff it broke was huge. VeriSign is interfering with the basic operation of the internet addressing system. ICANN is in charge of maintaining order in that system. ICANN is doing exactly what they’re supposed to.

http://www.verisign.com/corporate/about/contact/index.html is VeriSign’s contact page. Get a hold of them and let them know how you feel. Use the toll-free phone numbers, as it’s harder for them to ignore phone calls than emails. Tell them that you’re unhappy that they’re breaking a great deal of the internet’s functionality so that they can do a bit more advertising on the World Wide Web (which is only a small part of the internet). ICANN is far from perfect, but at least they’re not mucking up huge portions of the internet for a few more bucks.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/26/235256 is the /. article with lots of great comments too. This one pretty much sums it up:

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has no authority to prevent VeriSign from rolling out a search engine for users who mistype Internet addressees, VeriSign said, as well as another feature that allows users to sign up for a waiting list for desirable domain names.

Hey Verisign: We don’t care if you want to make a search engine for miss-spelled domains, nor do we care if you want to setup a domain name waiting list. In fact the only thing that bothers anyone is that you’re breaking DNS to force us to use them.

If this was really about setting up a search engine and nothing else they could just register vs-sitefinder.com and vs-domain-wait-list.com and be in business. Instead they insist on pissing on their responsibility to maintain a functional DNS system in order to achieve some sort of edge over the competition.

Is there some sort of contest for the most hated corporation going on between Microsoft, SCO, and Verisign?