What was a mere request in late September has turned into a command of sorts. And just hours after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers told VeriSign to either suspend their controversial Site Finder service, by 9 p.m. Eastern time October 4, or face the prospect of legal action from the Internet's key oversight group, VeriSign agreed to shut it down – well before the ICANN deadline.
ICANN announced early October 3 that Site Finder – which VeriSign began as a way to help surfers who misspell or mistype domain names in their browser location bars find their way to the site they wanted – violated the terms of VeriSign's contract to administer .com and .net master address lists.
"War has broken out," said Paxfire co-founder Mark Lewyn to Reuters. "This is a battle over who controls the rules and regulations of the Internet going forward."
Lewyn if anyone is in a position to know: Paxfire tried a Site Finder-like service involving .biz domain names in May, according to the Associated Press, but the company was rebuffed in that effort before it got to the level of controversy attached to Site Finder.
ICANN chief executive officer Paul Twomey is said to have sent a letter to VeriSign executive Russell Lewis saying Site Finder has had "a substantial adverse effect" on cyberspace stability, including unexpected e-mail jamming and spam filtering compromises, among other side effects.
VeriSign reportedly asked for more time to make implementing the reversal simpler, but ICANN rejected that request quickly, according to news reports.
"There have been widespread expressions of concern about the impact of these changes on the security and stability of the Internet," said ICANN in a formal statement. VeriSign, for its part, accused ICANN of using "anecdotal and isolated issues to attempt to regulate non-registry services, but in the interests of further working with the technical community, we will temporarily suspend SiteFinder," according to its own statement.
