full-disclosure - Verisign abusing .COM/.NET monopoly, BIND releases new

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Message-ID: <1063778164.3168.18.camel@tantor.nuclearelephant.com>
From: jonathan at nuclearelephant.com (Jonathan A. Zdziarski)
Subject: Verisign abusing .COM/.NET monopoly, BIND
	releases new

There's a link to a great rant about this in an article I wrote up today
about Verisign's Anti-Competitive history at
http://www.nuclearelephant.com/papers/verisign.html.  A few key points
the author of the rant hits on is that Verisign implemented this
virtually overnight with no input whatsoever from the operations
community.  As a result, it broke a lot of things such as Anti-Spam
tools that reject mail from nonexistent domains, intercepts passwords
and other URL information misdirected to a nonexistent site or
unreachable sites, and sitefinder apparently has an open SMTP relay as
well.

In my own article, I had started to make mention about making both
practical and legal moves towards creating a non-profit organization to
manage a centralized top-level registry + a new set of root servers with
a _predefined set of rules_ all registry subscribers (domain registries)
must adhere to or risk being removed.  As I read more about some of the
whacked-on-drugs things Verisign has done recently, I'm beginning to
think we need to move on something like this a lot quicker than we have
been.  

The InterNIC wasn't perfect, but they certainly weren't commercialized
in the way Verisign is now.  The Internet now being a commercial
enterprise, root servers and TLDs should by no means be in the hands of
a for-profit corporation.