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The latest exchange of letters between ICANN and Verisign is now available from ICANN's web site.

In response to ICANN's pressure last Friday, Verisign's Rusty Lewis accuses ICANN of a violation of the Registry Agreement as well as an anti-competitive interference with VeriSign's existing contractual and other advantageous business relationships. Threatens Lewis: VeriSign fully intends to hold ICANN accountable for the damages caused by its improper actions.

In a second letter, also dated 3 October, Lewis complains about lacking neutrality in ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee, and about lack of opportunity to debunk some of the misconceptions currently being forwarded.

In a letter from Monday, Twomey responds. He rejects Verisign's concerns about the SecSAC and tomorrow's agenda, and suggests that SecSAC should hold a second meeting two weeks later or at such a time as VeriSign is ready to state its full technical position. Verisign is also formally requested to release its testing data from before, during and after the Service Change and to do so well in advance of the Second Meeting.

Verisign's latest spin goes like this:

ICANN caved under the pressure from some in the Internet community for whom this is a technology-religion issue about whether the Internet should be used for these purposes.

For this vocal minority, resentment lingers at the very fact that the Internet is used for commercial purpose, which ignores the fact that it's a critical part of our economy.

That's, of course, outrageous nonsense. What Verisign attempts to do is to throw out services that are being provided at the network's edges by abusing its government-granted stewardship role for .com and .net.

The objection here is not about commercial use of the Internet: It's about keeping the net's architecture open for commerce. It's about keeping an architecture which enables different players to compete by providing innovative and better services to customers.

Verisign's sitefinder, however, is no such service: The only "innovation" here is to change the net's architecture in a way which makes it impossible for other players to compete with Verisign.

Time for a re-bid?

The SecSAC meeting on Sitefinder in Washington DC is about to begin.

General Meeting Information · Agenda · Webcast

Comments can be sent to secsac-comment@icann.org.

After Steve Crocker has finished his introductory remarks, Verisign's Scott Hollenbeck delivers his presentation on Sitefinder.

What is Sitefinder? Implementation. Technical Questions Raised. DNS Wildcard Guidelines. Questions?

Notes below. Most of what Hollenbeck says is (almost verbatim) what's in Verisign's response to the IAB, though.

David Schairer (VP Software Engineering, XO Communications) speaks on consequences of sitefinder.

Paul Vixie presents. Observed workarounds.

Richard M. Smith talks about information flow. Passing information to Omniture. Forms that point to expired domain names. Frames, pictures, scripts that are redirected to Sitefinder.

A lot of information is sent to sitefinder.

Fundamental point: Why not run sitefinder as applet in a web browser? Do it at the client side.

Steve Crocker introduces Bellovin, "incredibly smart guy." Topic: Architectural issues.

Internet Protocols and Innovation. Starts by explaining interaction between MX and A records, and problems with early versions of Exchange and Outlook, taking up some remarks from Bellovin. Somewhat hard to understand over the webcast.

Harold Feld: Does this break end-to-end? Getting into a war between Verisign and Microsoft?

First, links into my notes: Hollenbeck, Schairer, Vixie, Smith, Bellovin, Klensin (+ discussion), final discussion. I suppose that electronic versions of the presentations will show up somewhere on the SecSAC site.

Nothing unexpected happened: Verisign tried to be collaborative with respect to fixing individual technical issues (suggesting, e.g., to introduce a wildcard MX record instead of running a bounce server), but did not seem willing to compromise on the design side of things.

The best presentations were clearly given by Bellovin and Klensin; however, they were hard to transcribe given the high information-per-time density. Both made the importance of the Internet's end-to-end design for innovation -- and the importance of a properly functioning DNS for that design -- abundantly clear. The message from their talks is that sitefinder is not just a bad idea because of individual side-effects, but because of the service's fundamental design.

Finally, the question asked by (I believe) K Claffy from CAIDA in the end of the meeting is indeed interesting: What kind of testing did Verisign actually perform before rolling out Sitefinder? What kinds of hard facts were generated during that testing process? (I'd add one more, though: How could the "snubby mail rejector daemon" survive any kind of rigorous testing?)

At today's meeting, Verisign's Chuck Gomes rhetorically asked whether the conclusion should be that innovation at the network's edges should be encouraged, even when it breaks standards, and that innovation at the network's center should be discouraged, even when it complies with standards.

Things are, of course, more difficult than that.