VeriSign Begins Massive PR Campaign To Let Them Turn SiteFinder Back On

from the we-stand-for-innovation! dept

After "reluctantly" turning off SiteFinder late last week, VeriSign came out swinging this week with its PR campaign against ICANN and anyone who dares oppose their will to hijack all domain name typos. They start out by declaring that ICANN has no authority to stop them, and, basically that no one has the authority to stop them because, gosh darnit, they're VeriSign, and why should anyone have any say in what they can do with their government-granted monopoly? Next up, they trot out another VP of VeriSign, Mark McLaughlin, (biased? not possible...) saying that this is really a battle between those who innovate (by which he means VeriSign - the same company that only recently realized that there were ways to update your domain name registration info online) and those dirt encrusted hippies who don't think the internet should be used for any commercial purposes whatsoever. Apparently, he hasn't looked at the bios of some of the folks criticizing the service. Finally, we start to see articles that are a bit more sympathetic to VeriSign's story, such as this one at Business Week which does make some valid points that some of the anti-SiteFinder claims have gone a bit too far. The internet didn't break. The anti-spam argument was overhyped, because fewer and fewer spammers use fake domains these days. However, the BW article does admit that SiteFinder does screw up some aspects of tools such as "ping" and "traceroute". It certainly made life difficult for me in trying to solve a DNS problem I was having . However, the real point is that VeriSign, without any real review, suddenly decided that all this traffic was theirs for the taking. This isn't about innovating and offering a better product for those who choose it - it was about simply taking all of that traffic as their own based solely on a monopoly they were handed.