Verisign to sell Network Solutions

Thu Oct 16 16:08:38 UTC 2003

>So...correct me if I'm wrong here...does this mean that the registry 
services 
>operations and the GTLD maintenance operations for .com/.net will be 
owned by 
>different companies?

Yep. And it means that Verisign business is no longer
based so much on serving customers but more on leveraging
various monopoly rights that they have such as ownership
of .com and ownership of the main root CAs whose 
certificates are bundled with Microsoft's OS.

>Isn't that what we wanted all along?

Uhhh... sort of, but I guess most folks really just wanted
the whole domain name business to be handled in an open
honest and fair manner. This latest move by Verisign doesn't 
make any substantial advance in that direction.

The fact is that we have created Verisign's .COM monopoly
by treating .com domains as the cool thing to have and we
are sustaining Verisign's .COM monopoly by not educating our
customers and our friends about the alternative domains
that are available.

As technically skilled people we could also help by developing
detailled transition plans to help people shift to a new
TLD and then turn off the old one. This isn't as straightforward
as just slapping an extra zone into DNS and an alias onto
Apache. If you want to get rid of the .com domain name then you
need some way of identifying which traffic still uses the old
.com domain name and then you need some means of notifying the
users to change their own records or address books.

--Michael Dillon