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SCMP Reporter

The battle between those who would own the internet and those who seek to liberate it goes all the way back to the days of Darpanet.

But, inevitably, the voices of the early idealists who forged the net have been lost in the hubbub of 600 million users with other things on their minds.

So it is nice to see a scandal like Verisign's domain name wildcard pull the old-timers out of their  closets.

You might have visited SiteFinder during the past week. You may not have gone there on purpose, but if you mistyped an address in your browser, this new search engine probably saw you do it.

SiteFinder was launched last Monday by Verisign, which maintains the central Domain Name Service (DNS) registry for the top-level .net and .com domains.

Verisign claims that, of the nine billion DNS queries it processes every day, 20 million  result from typos. Naturally, that could be 20 million hits to a potentially lucrative website.

With Verisign's DNS wildcard, any mistyped URL is redirected to Site Finder. Once there, the visitor receives an identifying cookie and the chance to visit sites that have paid to be listed via the placement business Overture.

Verisign's actions are not without precedent. The .museum top-level domain redirects typos ending in .museum to its own directory, though that is a small and highly specialised list. Of the Hong Kong museums listed in its directory, only one - the Heritage Museum - actually uses its .museum tag. America Online and Microsoft have been redirecting errors to their search engines for years. As people choose to sign up with America Online, that is harmless enough. But Microsoft has been criticised for exploiting its desktop monopoly. The one good thing to come out of the controversy will be a drop in traffic to MSN.

There are many downsides to what Verisign is doing. First of all, firewalls and spam filters that previously rejected traffic from fake domains no longer work. Now all addresses will appear to a mail server or firewall to be correct.

Next, e-mail users mistyping addresses either get a long-delayed bounce or are left unaware that their message has been swallowed by Verisign's servers. Other applications, such as the software on network printers, have also been broken, as their data is redirected to SearchFind. This also has potential security ramifications.

Privacy advocates have expressed concern that the data collected by Overture could be merged with the details stored in Verisign's Whois database - connecting names, addresses and phone numbers with details of websites visited. Verisign says no personal information will be gathered, but the potential risk is obvious.

Standards authorities including The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) have condemned Verisign. The Internet Software Consortium - which publishes the domain name management software Bind, used by most internet service providers - has issued a patch  that will block SiteFinder. In Hong Kong, there has been little action. The Hong Kong Internet Registration Corporation, which maintains the .hk domain, has not come up with a position, though it seems likely Hong Kong will adopt a multiple registrar model to avoid similar conflicts.

Charles Mok, president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation, agrees that Verisign's actions are questionable. 'The practice is more controversial because Verisign happens to be a registry and a registrar at the same time.' A Florida company, Popular Enterprises, last week filed a US$100 million anti-trust suit against Verisign.

Popular Enterprises, which owns the Netster search engine, is suing Verisign for breaking its SmartBrowse toolbar and the technology Netster uses to automatically scan for and register vacant domains. Netster claims to receive 24 million visits a month, many from people trying to access lapsed addresses. It also has 1.4 million people using SmartBrowse, which redirects typos to its search engine.

Netster may be a cybersquatter, but it does at least pay for its domains. Verisign's SearchFind effectively gets every lapsed or unregistered domain in the world for free.

Verisign does have responsibilities to its shareholders, and there is a clear conflict between running a global essential service and running a publicly listed business. SiteFinder illustrates the risks of a domain registry acting as its chief registrar and, as Hong Kong finds its own way, it should learn some lessons from the past week's debacle.

Meanwhile, Verisign should quit the registry business or put the public's interest ahead of  its shareholders'. The decision shouldn't be difficult.



Verisign's wildcard signals trouble for internet freedom