Contrast Beckstrom's interview with DelBianco's Argument Against New TLDs

[Jorge Amodio]

>> Are you talking about a SiteFinder like system?
>
> Conceptually, SiteFinder is a great initiative. One that open up
> increased mobile innovation and considering also that it is founded on
> Freedom of Information legislation. Unfortunately, many countries e.g.
> Kenya do not have FOI legislations therefore governments and
> institutions with the colour of the law and corporate entities of
> great public interest never disclose important information to the
> public.(We have been lobbying for FOI since 2000 and has been the
> global Freedom of Information week)

I believe you are getting confused with something else here.

SiteFinder was a wrong thing to do and it ended in a big lawsuit
between ICANN, DoC, Verisgn, etc.

Now is one of the reasons why on the DAG there is explicit mention
to restrict the use of wildcards on resource records at the apex of
a TLD.

The scheme use to work adding an entry on the zone for a given
domain name that had a wildcard (*) pointing to the IP address of
a website of this company, then when your browser asked the DNS
to resolve a name, if the name didn't exist instead of getting back
the notification that the name does not exist you will be directed
to this site (which was SiteFinder) and then there you have a
bunch of stuff to choose from, 99% for which the company
operating that TLD and that website was also making money.

My mention of ISPs tampering with the DNS is similar to what
SiteFinder did. For example if from here I try to get to the URL
"http://icann.noexiste" my ISP (Time Warner/RoadRunner)
intercepts the DNS response are redirects me to:
http://ww23.rr.com/index.php?origURL=http://icann.noexiste/
and as you will see, the links on the top are "sponsored", which
means people pay to be there and the ISP now has another
source of revenue.

Since this is being done tampering the DNS traffic but not using
a particular zone of the DNS and the ISPs have no contractual
obligations with ICANN there is nothing that can be done.

Cheers
Jorge