World turns while we vacation
The amazing debacle between Verisign and "The Rest of the World" about who can do what with the billions of unregistered character strings in the dot com and dot net namespace brought ICANN to Washington, DC yesterday in order to have a technically oriented meeting regarding Verisign's Sitefinder "service" that "serves" to break the net and foster a "all your names are belong to us" mentality.
The horrendously bad idea of making all unresolved domain names magically resolve to Verisign in order to become advertising vehicles for their registry service, brought gazillions of people out to attempt to convince the world that this is yet another money grab, albeit a lot more brazen than others.
And in yet another brazen move, our friend RS showed up at the meeting in an actual SHIRT with a COLLAR. And he looks respectable!
Many others attended the meeting, details of which are better covered by someone who was actually there :-). More of Declan's photos here .
Comments
Verisign has clearly abused their power. Now what, though?
Declan's photos are incredible.
Posted by: Camilo | October 8, 2003 08:46 AM
Now what? Good question. How far will ICANN go to bite the hand that feeds it? However, given the disdain that the Hill has for Verisign, perhaps lobbying Congress will his time do what nobody has yet been able to do - pressure the Dept. of Commerce to put some teeth into oversight.
Yes, I am being optimistic, but what can I say?
Otherwise, I think that if they do nothing, then technology will route around the breakage.
Posted by: Psycho Sensei | October 8, 2003 11:46 AM