Have you ever needed to ask for directions while you were driving? Let's say you stopped to ask a trusted authority, like a police officer.
You'd expect that officer to be honest, right? Wouldn't you expect him or her to provide you a safe, direct route to where you needed to go? I sure would.
But what if that officer instead misdirected you to a shopping mall? A shopping mall, it turns out, that actually paid the officer for every sale that resulted?
That would be an abuse of the police officer's authority. It would be capitalizing on your misfortune.
We believe that's what VeriSign is doing with its "Site Finder" marketing scheme. We believe that it is once again abusing the power to oversee all .com and .net domains it was granted by the U.S. government.
Go Daddy is now suing in federal court to stop them.
Here's how VeriSign's scheme can affect you:
* It will misdirect you from your intended destination and even mislead you about its status. If you type any .com or .net address into your browser that isn't already registered, VeriSign hijacks you and sends you to an advertising page that they own. This can occur even when you type in a site that is registered, but is not displaying temporarily.
Used to be, if you made a mistake in typing an address which is the usual reason for not finding a site you would see either a "404" error page, or a help page that your browser would generate. Now though, VeriSign has hijacked this entire process and puts up a paid-advertising page, the so-called Site Finder.
* It will cost you money. Advertisers pay VeriSign to position links to their services that look similar to the misspelled address. And that means you may well find your way to a competitor, rather than to your intended destination. Simply navigating on the Internet will be more frustrating and more expensive for consumers. Companies will be forced to purchase every imaginable misspelling of their names to prevent their customers from being hijacked by Site Finder, and the cost will be passed on to you. To VeriSign, of course, these forced domain registrations just mean more revenue.
* It will mean more spam headed for your inbox. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) across the globe have committed valuable time and resources to developing systems that prevent spam from reaching your mailbox. One of the more successful methods checks to see whether the domain name of the inbound email resolves to an actual Web site. If it doesn't, that means the domain is fake, so your ISP doesn't let it through. Now, though, spammers can use any phony domains they want, because all fake domains will "resolve" to the Site Finder page!
Go Daddy's spam filter, Spam Xploder, will not be affected because it uses Bayesian filtering technology, instead of relying on the DNS servers, to determine if email is spam or not.
We at Go Daddy feel that Site Finder amounts to an abuse; that VeriSign is misusing its registry position to gain unfair advantage over the entire Internet community. And as we did in 2002, when we sued VeriSign over its renewal scam, we're determined to stop it.
We're asking a Federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction that will halt this. If you feel, as we do, that VeriSign is once again inappropriately capitalizing on its position of authority, we urge you to email VeriSign and ICANN and let them know.
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You'd expect that officer to be honest, right? Wouldn't you expect him or her to provide you a safe, direct route to where you needed to go? I sure would.
But what if that officer instead misdirected you to a shopping mall? A shopping mall, it turns out, that actually paid the officer for every sale that resulted?
That would be an abuse of the police officer's authority. It would be capitalizing on your misfortune.
We believe that's what VeriSign is doing with its "Site Finder" marketing scheme. We believe that it is once again abusing the power to oversee all .com and .net domains it was granted by the U.S. government.
Go Daddy is now suing in federal court to stop them.
Here's how VeriSign's scheme can affect you:
* It will misdirect you from your intended destination and even mislead you about its status. If you type any .com or .net address into your browser that isn't already registered, VeriSign hijacks you and sends you to an advertising page that they own. This can occur even when you type in a site that is registered, but is not displaying temporarily.
Used to be, if you made a mistake in typing an address which is the usual reason for not finding a site you would see either a "404" error page, or a help page that your browser would generate. Now though, VeriSign has hijacked this entire process and puts up a paid-advertising page, the so-called Site Finder.
* It will cost you money. Advertisers pay VeriSign to position links to their services that look similar to the misspelled address. And that means you may well find your way to a competitor, rather than to your intended destination. Simply navigating on the Internet will be more frustrating and more expensive for consumers. Companies will be forced to purchase every imaginable misspelling of their names to prevent their customers from being hijacked by Site Finder, and the cost will be passed on to you. To VeriSign, of course, these forced domain registrations just mean more revenue.
* It will mean more spam headed for your inbox. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) across the globe have committed valuable time and resources to developing systems that prevent spam from reaching your mailbox. One of the more successful methods checks to see whether the domain name of the inbound email resolves to an actual Web site. If it doesn't, that means the domain is fake, so your ISP doesn't let it through. Now, though, spammers can use any phony domains they want, because all fake domains will "resolve" to the Site Finder page!
Go Daddy's spam filter, Spam Xploder, will not be affected because it uses Bayesian filtering technology, instead of relying on the DNS servers, to determine if email is spam or not.
We at Go Daddy feel that Site Finder amounts to an abuse; that VeriSign is misusing its registry position to gain unfair advantage over the entire Internet community. And as we did in 2002, when we sued VeriSign over its renewal scam, we're determined to stop it.
We're asking a Federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction that will halt this. If you feel, as we do, that VeriSign is once again inappropriately capitalizing on its position of authority, we urge you to email VeriSign and ICANN and let them know.
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