Site Finder

Fri Oct 17 09:57:14 UTC 2003

>I wonder how eager they would be to implement wildcards if restricted 
>from making any revenue from the service the wildcard points to (ie. 
>sitefinder).

If Verisign establishes that it is a legitimate business practice
to redirect traffic for misspelled domain names, then the question
is, who has the most right to do this? This is especially important
in the case of an ISP who could easily divert the misspelled traffic
themselves by making some simple changes to their DNS servers.
Since there is a direct business relationship between the ISP and
the end user, one would think that their rights take precedence
over Verisign's, both in law and in actual technical facts.

I wouldn't be surprised to see this sort of diversion pop up in
University networks because their user communities are focussed 
on a single purpose, namely education. I could see them forwarding
to a site that tells the user why they were diverted to the page,
explains the privacy risks of the Verisign diversion, gives them
an option to change DNS servers to opt-out of the University's 
diversion, and provides links to online dictionaries, spell-checking
software, keyboarding software, etc. 

--Michael Dillon