VeriSign Sticks To Its Guns On Site Finder Battle

Even as solution providers, ISPs and industry observers blast what they characterize as VeriSign's hijacking of Web traffic, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company stands firm.

When Web surfers type an incorrect .com or .net URL they are now sent to Site Finder, a VeriSign site that offers tips for finding the intended destination. The site also suggests alternative sites and links to ad-sponsored sites, which has critics on a tear. They maintain that VeriSign, which controls the popular .com and .net domains under a contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), has abdicated its responsibility as a neutral arbiter and registry of domain names in return for ad revenue.

Solution providers--and even ICANN--have blasted the move as contributing to instability on the Web. ICANN asked VeriSign to stop the service last Friday, a request that VeriSign refused. (See story.)

In an interview with CRN Wednesday, VeriSign Chairman and CEO Stratton Sclavos remained adamant about the situation and characterized Site Finder critics as a "vocal minority."

Sclavos added: "Within two days of Site Finder being out there, the vast majority of our customers and prospects were fine. The noise we're still hearing is from technical purists and those with a political bias or agenda because they are competitors."

In a statement last week, ICANN said that VeriSign "appeared to have considerably weakened the stability of the Internet, introduced ambiguous and inaccurate responses in the [Domain Name System], and has caused an escalating chain reaction of measures and countermeasures that contribute to further instability."

Sclavos said there is a "strange dynamic at work" in the DNS space: "You have a quasi-government organization, ICANN, made up of purists and attorneys. You have an incredibly overzealous vocal minority that thinks everything should be free. And then you have everybody else that uses the Internet every day and doesn't know what ICANN is," he said. "I think this is a broken model that we have talked to ICANN and the [U.S.] Department of Commerce about. If Site Finder is the point to drive the debate home, then let's have it."

If Sclavos is looking for a fight, he just might get one. Critics maintain that VeriSign, by virtue of its contract, is basically a monopoly sanctioned by the Department of Commerce.

"They should be held to higher standards, just as Microsoft was in the 1990s, AT&T was in the '80s and IBM before that," said Brian Bergin, president of Terabyte Computers, a network consultancy in Boone, N.C.

Search engine and portal companies, presumably affected by Site Finder, have remained largely mum on the subject. Google had no comment, and a Microsoft MSN spokeswoman said VeriSign's "decision to redirect traffic from misspelled queries does not significantly impact MSN Search because the amount of traffic driven to our site through mistyped Internet queries is minimal."

But those companies and others reportedly are watching VeriSign's moves very carefully and bringing pressure to bear.

Sclavos said he expected more criticism from search engine companies. He discounted claims of "user stealing," saying it took America Online less than 48 hours to devise a way to work around Site Finder. He said VeriSign continues to talk with AOL about the issue, but executives there could not be reached for comment.

Last week Popular Enterprises, the parent company of a relatively small search engine player called Netster.com, sued VeriSign in a Florida federal court for $100 million, alleging antitrust violations and unfair competition.

Meanwhile, VARs are saying that VeriSign's Site Finder has set up a chain reaction that's rippling throughout the Web and disrupting DNS lookups that would tag incorrect domain names.

"What they've done is remove the ability for default search options to work in Internet Explorer and other browsers and significantly increased the amount of mail-server bandwidth usage," Bergin said. "Mail that's now accepted would have been bounced on the From clause, and mail that has a mistyped domain in the To field will still try to be delivered where before it would have just been returned after a DNS lookup failed to find [an MX or A record]."