Last week, VeriSign, the people who run the .com registry (the big data file that has all the .com registration data in it), unilaterally decided to change the way the most-traveled portion of the Internet works for most people. Until then, if you typed in a .com domain name that didn't exist, you would get an error message. Unless, of course, you were an MSN or AOL subscriber, in which case you would get a custom web page they each designed, and which included some ads from folks who thought that they might profit from common misspellings.
Well, VeriSign saw a profit opportunity, and it decided to eat AOL's and MSN's and everyone else's lunch by introducing its “Sitefinder” service. In the new .com, every browser typo, every attempt to load up (the technical term is “resolve”) a domain that didn't actually exist, leads you to special pages designed and owned by VeriSign…and on which we are all invited to buy tailored advertising. [Sitefinder, incidentally, has the most unintentionally hilarious terms of service I have ever seen : a web page you go to by accident, and only because VeriSign made you, links to the adhesive assertion that “By using the service(s) provided by VeriSign under these Terms of Use, you acknowledge that you have read and agree to be bound by all terms and conditions here in and documents incorporated by reference.” But I digress.]
Naturally, MSN and AOL are unhappy. But the technical community is furious. The web is not the whole Internet, and there are many other Internet tools that rely on getting the standard error message when a domain does not resolve properly. VeriSign's change threatened to break all those applications. [There are a lot of ccTLDs (national top-level domains like .ph) and one gTLD (.museum) that already do the same thing. But they are almost all very low volume, and their users were—in the main—forewarned before they registered their domains.]
The technical community responded by coding up changes to BIND, the dominant software for translating domain names into the Internet Protocol numbers that actually do the real work of identifying where the content you want is to be found, and telling the computer that has it how to find you. These changes essentially overtrump the VeriSign change. But fixes like this take time to deploy and propagate. It would be much tidier if VeriSign could be persuaded to put the cat back in the bag.
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