bucy wrote:
] As Decius has said, now the court proceedings start. Best
] case scenario is that ICANN can get a preliminary injunction
] against Verisign forcing them to turn SiteFinder off. If so,
] it will be very difficult for them to turn it back on.

Well, I was wrong, they backed down. Which means I seriously overestimated them. I presumed that ICANN wasn't going to tell them to back down because there was nothing in the contract that this impacted. I was wrong. Verisign's lawyers must have know this. And their engineers must have anticipated the technical nightmare. If there were no technical problems with this they would have asked for permission. So it must have been clear that things would play out this way. Why do it? Right now they've wasted a lot of money, pissed off a huge number of customers, and, in general, look like assholes. Where is the upside for them? Maybe they ignored their engineers and their lawyers, except for the ones who where telling them that Iraq bought nuclear weapons in Afri.... wait, sorry, wrong issue...

] Does anyone else think its insane that a domain registrar
] should control the master databases? Its a HUGE conflict of
] interest! Why doesn't ICANN (or some other non-profit/NGO)
] run it??

I think its just historical. Its like the Bell System. Netsol ran it, and they let netsol become a business, and then they figured out that there needed to be a competitive environment...