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

[Alex Gakuru]

On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 4:55 PM, Jorge Amodio <jmamodio at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 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.

You are right I did not know about it. Because of telcos earlier
mention I assumed it was about http://www.sitefinder.ofcom.org.uk/ Now
I know meant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_Finder

> 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.
>

Very interesting indeed!