February 10, 2004
SiteFinder redux?

Dan Gillmor warns that Verisign is looking to relaunch its loathed SiteFinder: "VeriSign will ultimately do whatever it can get away with."

VeriSign characterizes SiteFinder opponents as anti-innovation ("an ideological belief by a narrow section of the technological community who don't believe you should innovate the core infrastructure of the Internet") but that couldn't be further from the truth. Most technologists strongly support innovation, they just don't believe that VeriSign should be able to parlay its monopoly on the .com and .net naming hierarchies into a monopoly on innovation. As Paul Vixie puts it:

"What they're saying is, 'We want to shift cost to the community to increase our profit,'" Vixie said. "This is a form of theft by most legal definitions, if you're going to shift costs unilaterally toward another group of people to increase your own profits. It's certainly unethical and immoral and it would be illegal if you were to do it with physical goods."
I've said it before and will say it again, keeping the center simple best promotes innovation overall.

Posted by Wendy at February 10, 2004 06:19 AM | TrackBack
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