ICANN asks VeriSign to pull redirect service

Tue Sep 23 14:26:43 UTC 2003

John Dvorak wrote:
> and the response from Russell Lewis:
> http://www.icann.org/correspondence/lewis-to-twomey-21sep03.htm
> 

<explenative deleted>! The Internet works perfectly fine for years. They 
make a change which is confirmed to disrupt service. Instead of 
restoring the stable state while conducting a review, they feel that 
they must keep the service as is? This is the problem with a for-profit 
company. They are keeping it to make money. The truth is that no one 
would complain about reverting back to the stable condition which 
everyone has lived with for years. They are complaining now. In 
addition, the IAB has already published a report that pointed out the 
various problems. Much discussion has existed on the topic across all 
the major networking/spam/security mailing lists. It is obvious that 
they have broken a lot of things. To not revert is to push their own 
needs; ie. profit.

> This quote is also interesting:
> 
> "This was done after many months of testing and analysis and in compliance with
> all applicable technical standards"
> 

The system is technically within standards. The purpose of the IAB is 
not only to watch standards, but to also understand common use of the 
network. Many standards have been changed to reflect common use. A good 
section of RFC's are about common use. As networks implement standards, 
there are always incompatibilities and extra's that are added in. As 
deployment reaches general use, it is one of the duties of the IAB to 
recognize that such utilization is in place and what the overall effect 
on the Internet is.

In this case, IAB did state that the wildcard use did break commonly 
used mechanisms deployed on the Internet, even if it was technically 
within the standard. This is one reason that it was recommended that the 
users of the tld be allowed to decide on if a wildcard is appropriate. 
For .museum, it is appropriate. It's even in their ICANN agreements. For 
com and net, no such precedent was ever set and complaints from the 
users of said tld are being ignored. Common use was broken.

-Jack