Verisign's public opinion play

Tue Oct 7 12:13:26 UTC 2003

At 10:27 AM +0100 10/7/03, Michael.Dillon at radianz.com wrote:
>  >I think this list may be a very good choice of where to construct
>>such a response.
>
>Are you being paid by Verisign?
>A "constructed" response is the worst thing we could
>do. Everyone should write their own responses in their
>own words based on their own experiences or their own
>skills and knowledge. That's the only way to demonstrate
>that Verisign was wrong, wrong, wrong.

I have to disagree.  Verisign is playing this game with considerable 
political savvy.  Disparate responses of varying quality do not get 
the media's attention, and they play right into Verisign's hands, 
because they have characterized this as a dispute between a 
respectable, secure and reliable company against a bunch of scattered 
techies.  I don't think that sending those letters and writing those 
articles does any harm per se, however I think the focus should be in 
providing technical *and marketing* ammunition to ICANN and focusing 
our defense there.  A single organization pushing a message over and 
over is more likely to get press attention.  Note also that we are at 
a considerable disadvantage in that our discussions of what approach 
to take our taking place in public forums ("Hi, Verisign").  Nothing 
like advance warning.

The other thing I think would help is to paint the picture in terms 
that the general public can understand.  Verisign can do this because 
the "benefit" is something that web users understand.  Type something 
wrong--get a search page.  Most of the drawbacks are much more 
technical.  I have an idea in this space, I'll post it later today. 
The other thing we should focus on is process.  Verisign is claiming 
that we fight innovation and commercialization of the internet 
(pretty wacko, given the business we are in).  The fact of the matter 
is that there are established procedures for innovating the core 
technology of the internet, and they didn't follow them.  We need to 
push the fact that they didn't just break the internet, they broke 
the rules, and this "innocent company being held back by techies" 
ploy is a bunch of garbage.

I'm not sure if it helps in this argument to rehash all the other 
problems with Verisign (like, how they managed to take the guaranteed 
cash cow of domain registration and manage it so insecurely and with 
such poor customer service that we all ran quickly to other 
registrars).  Certainly it would be good to counter their public 
image, but it probably should be done separately from this issue.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/         Next Generation Spam Defense
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/  Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.