Controversial temporary redirection Web service Site Finder got slapped for violating commonly accepted codes of online conduct, in an 85-page report released this week by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
The report said Site Finder wreaked no truly catastrophic effects but violated "community standards and caused harm to individual users and enterprises," through redirecting misspelled or nonexistent domain names to its own Website purported to help surfers find the direction they actually wanted to go.
Created by VeriSign, which has had a monopoly as the .com and .net master database administrator, Site Finder was accused by critics of trying to exploit Web surfer typographical errors or wrong domain information for profit by way of Site Finder site advertising. VeriSign had insisted to ICANN that Site Finder was a way to handle nonexistent or misspelled domains better than the familiar error messages browsers now offer, calling most of the problems Site Finder caused either minor or inconvenient.
VeriSign took down Site Finder last fall after ICANN's original objections, but the company also sued ICANN, accusing the governing body of unreasonably prohibiting Internet innovation.
But ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee concluded that Site Finder interfered with some e-mail systems, spam filters, and other Web services. The committee also determined Site Finder's impact on other Internet protocols was not accounted by VeriSign's "incorrect" focus on Web users, and that Site Finder was activated so abruptly that privacy violations were possible.
