Paul Vixen on SiteFinder

Posted on 24 Sep 2003 in General

Paul Vixie, 20 year veteran of the Internet, co-author of BIND discusses Verisign's domain wild-carding for SiteFinder:

"Some people suggest that administration of the DNS is a public trust, and that VeriSign is merely the caretaker of this system, not its owner. And now VeriSign has abused that trust. That may be true. Before a few days ago it didn't matter whether VeriSign was the owner or a caretaker. Now it matters a lot. VeriSign kicked a sleeping dog. It's a bizarre thing to do. Was it really VeriSign's decision to make, unilaterally? Did it need permission to make this decision? If so, what entity has the authority to grant such permission? As a result there will be a big policy debate now. Someone will decide if permission needed to be had. Someone will decide if it should be delegated to someone else."

The Internet Architecture Board has also published a summary of the effects of DNS wildcarding, and recommended that wildcards placed that high in the registry hierachy be removed:

"The Principle of Least Astonishment suggests that the deployment of wildcards was disastrous for the users. It had widesweeping effects on other users of the Internet far beyond those enumerated by the zone operator, created several brand new problems, and caused other internet entities to make hasty, possibly mutually incompatible and possibly deleterious (to the internet as a whole) changes to their own operations in an attempt to react to the change."

As the pressure and law suits mount on Verisign, I hope they back down. Verisign, wow.. I used to think so highly of that company, now.. gee. [via slashdot]

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/09/22/vixie.html

Tags: Companies