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Small ASRG update and more on Sitefinder

As I said on my homepage - “but do not expect frequent updates”. So I finally got around to updating this blog.

Well, the past week or so has been pretty busy. The ASRG had seen some pretty heavy posting volume although today it has slowed down a little. We finally got all of the various RMX people together so they can start working on a common proposal and lots of other good efforts are under way as well.

Also, ICANN has announced a meeting to discuss Verisign’s recent behavior - it will be held October 7th in Washington, DC. I looked over the invitees list and there are 23 people listed as of right now, whose affiliations are very interesting. They seem to me to line up as follows:

Defendants - Verisign and the company providing the whole DNS/search thing - Paxfire
Competition - mainly other gTLD Registraries - EDUCAUSE (.edu and they are non-profit), Neustar (.us, .kids.us, .cn and .biz), and Afilias (.info and they also provide the backend for .org, which is operated by PIR / ISOC), etc.
“Uncle Sam” - NTIA - they OWN (in the fullest sense of that word) the DNS system which ICANN operates under contract further subcontracting .COM and .NET to VeriSign
Lawyers - someone from the Cardozo School of Law, plus I am sure many others
Internet standards folks - IETF and affiliated private individuals, etc.
Big Business - AT&T, Namespace Strategy Group, etc.
Non-Profits - SDF, etc.
Consultants - Summit Strategies International?, others, etc.
Others - all the ones I can’t decipher

Pretty interesting possibilities, eh? So the defendants will argue that they didn’t do anything wrong, the competition and big business will either defend them so they can do the same thing, or attack them in hopes of getting the .COM and .NET contracts while the non-profits and the IETF folks will preach standards adherence. Lawyers and consultants will hover over like vultures in hopes of getting some carrion from whomever loses (just think “class action lawsuit” - don’t even think, there are a few filed already!). Meanwhile ICANN and “Uncle Sam” (who legally is the owner of the DNS system and is the final decision maker), will try to decide who is right (although if the US Government owns DNS, and taxpayers own the government, that means I own the DNS system, and I get to decide to who wins…). Anyway, this sounds like a bad joke - “a lawyer, a businessman and a g-man….” ANYWAY, I wish that someone from the anti-spam community would be there but maybe the IETF folks will keep anti-spam solutions in mind when discussing the issue. So we’ll see what happens with this…

But in any case, the IAB has already stated:
“Proposed guideline: If you want to use wildcards in your zone and understand the risks, go ahead, but only do so with the informed consent of the entities that are delegated within your zone.” and that “We recommend that any and all TLDs which use wildcards in a manner inconsistent with this guideline remove such wildcards at the earliest opportunity.”
Now the IAB “provides oversight of, and occasional commentary on, aspects of the architecture for the protocols and procedures used by the Internet.” And I think they are pretty experienced with the Internet, since they were around since back in 1979.

So in conclusion I think we should trust what they recommend that “any TLDs which use wildcards…” (hint, hint) “remove such wildcards at the earliest opportunity”

Tags: asrg, rmx, senderid, sitefinder, spf, verisign —

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