VeriSign caves in to ICANN pressure

By Steve Malone

Posted on 6 Oct 2003 at 10:53

US registrar VeriSign has bowed to pressure from ICANN and removed the controversial redirection of non-existent .net. and .com sites to its own Site Finder search page.

The move follows a letter sent to VeriSign CEO Russell Lewis by ICANN CEO Paul Twomey, threatening to take action unless VeriSign complied with the request.

Versign's decision on the 15 September caused uproar in the Internet community. ICANN had already politely requestedthat VeriSign pulled the redirect. However, VeriSign refused stating that 'it would be premature to decide on any course of action' before everyone had a chance to assess the impact.

ICANN said that the Site Finder redirects a huge number of problems around the Internet. These included causing fatal errors with some email configurations, raising privacy issues, preventing anti-spam software from identifying false domains, interfering with certain DNS lookup services and basically causing everyone else a whole lot of grief.

As a result ICANN said that 'For all these reasons, ICANN has... insisted that VeriSign suspend the SiteFinder service, and restore the .com and .net top-level domains to the way they were operated prior to 15 September 2003. If VeriSign does not comply with this demand by 6:00 PM PDT on 4 October 2003, ICANN will be forced to take the steps necessary to enforce VeriSign's contractual obligations.' Faced with the prospect of ICANN pulling the plug on them, VeriSign had no option by to comply.

ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a non-profit organisation that is responsible for the IP address space allocation and domain name system management.