ICANN to Verisign: Thou shalt not redirect

July 2004

Over the weekend ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee released a report condemning VeriSign's SiteFinder service and recommends it never be used in the public realm again. VeriSign caused a ruckus when they launched their SiteFinder service that redirected unregistered domains to a paid advertising service, and suspended SiteFinder after threats from ICANN. The committee came down hard on VeriSign saying the company unleashed an untested service, without public comment, that interfered with services that expected routine DNS name error codes.

The basic conclusion of the 78-page report: "Don't do this," [committee chairman Steve] Crocker said. "Don't redirect uninstantiated domain names in the big, public registries," he said. "It creates all kinds of problems, and it's not the right thing to do."

Among the report's eight findings was that SiteFinder "violated fundamental Internet engineering principles" by mingling different architectural layers of the Internet. SiteFinder targeted HTTP requests, but because it was operated at the level of the DNS (Domain Name System), it also affected other Internet protocols, Crocker said.