more on VeriSign to revive redirect service

Thu Oct 16 13:44:23 UTC 2003

Miles Fidelman wrote:
> Just out of curiousity, I wonder how many domain registrations those of us
> on nanog represent?  Contract sanctions from ICANN are one thing, taking
> all of our business elsewhere might also be effective at getting a point
> across (though it might also backfire - pushing Verisign to be even more
> agressive at taking advantage of their positioning).

I get the impression they are still living under the old Bell Motto: We 
don't have to care, we're The Registrar.

A couple years ago when their monopoly was broken, I used it as a threat 
to try to finally get a report of all the domains on our nameservers. 
For years I would send requests every couple months, and each and every 
one was ignored.

I sent Verisign a list of ~1000 domains I knew were pointed to us, and 
said "Can you confirm these are the only ones? If I don't get an answer, 
I'm moving them all to another registrar." I never got an answer.

The final straw that sent us to OpenSRS was the creation of ~1000 unique 
  accounts for us to use to manage those domains, when the old e-mail 
method went away.... Of course, the passwords were all snail-mailed to 
our clients, effectively taking away control of those domains from us. 
Verisign obviously doesn't want the Registrar business, or they would 
have found out a way to combine all those accounts when we asked.

We figure that a company so clueless doesn't deserve our certificate 
business either, and are pretty happy with GeoTrust.