From: Matt Larson
Date: Mon Sep 15 19:32:04 2003
Subject: Change to .com/.net behavior

Today VeriSign is adding a wildcard A record to the .com and .net zones. The wildcard record in the .net zone was activated from 10:45AM EDT to 13:30PM EDT. The wildcard record in the .com zone is being added now. We have prepared a white paper describing VeriSign's wildcard implementation, which is available here:

http://www.verisign.com/resources/gd/sitefinder/implementation.pdf

By way of background, over the course of last year, VeriSign has bee engaged in various aspects of web navigation work and study. These activities were prompted by analysis of the IAB's recommendations regarding IDN navigation and discussions within the Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries (CENTR) prompted by DNS wildcard testing in the .biz and .us top-level domains. Understanding that some registries have already implemented wildcards and that others may in the future, we believe that it would be helpful to have a set of guidelines for registries and would like to make them publicly available for that purpose. Accordingly, we drafted a white paper describing guidelines for the use of DNS wildcards in top-level domain zones. This document, which may be of interest to the NANOG community, is available here:

http://www.verisign.com/resources/gd/sitefinder/bestpractices.pdf