ICANN urges VeriSign to suspend SiteFinder

Violates 'Principle Of Least Astonishment'

Net governing body ICANN has called on VeriSign to "voluntarily suspend" Site Finder amid renewed concerns that the web typo replacement service could undermine key Net standards.

Last week VeriSign deployed a "wildcard" service into the .com and .net Top Level Domain zones. This VeriSign wildcard redirects traffic that would otherwise have resulted in a "no domain" response to a VeriSign-operated website, called Site Finder, the features, search results and links to paid advertisements.

"Since the deployment, ICANN has been monitoring community reaction, including analysis of the technical effects of the wildcard, and is carefully reviewing the terms of the .com and .net Registry Agreements," the Net governing body said in a statement.

"Recognizing the concerns about the wildcard service, ICANN has called upon VeriSign to voluntarily suspend the service until the various reviews now underway are completed," it added.

ICANN has requested advice from its Security and Stability Advisory Committee, and from the Internet Architecture Board, on the impact of the changes implemented by VeriSign.

A report from the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), released last weekend, says the VeriSign's changes have had "undesirable and unintended consequences", imposing a overhead on users, and affecting the robustness of the Internet.

The document suggests VeriSign's "wildcard" service goes against "two basic principles of architectural design which have served the Internet well for many years": the Robustness Principle and the (splendidly named) Principle Of Least Astonishment, which says a program should always respond in the way that is least likely to astonish the user.

The IAB's highly critical report on DNS Wildcards can be found here.

VeriSign has yet to respond to ICANN's call to drop Site Finder. ®

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