Paul Vixie on VeriSign (O'ReillyNet)

Paul Vixie on VeriSign (O'ReillyNet)

I don't know why Vixie even acknowledges the argument that Verisign owns .com and .net. If you look at the history, it's obvious no one ever intended for those top level domains (TLDs) to belong to Verisign. They just wanted Verisign to operate the registry and name servers. The agreements make it clear that ICANN, with consensus of the Internet community at large, is responsible for determining what sort of name service should exist.

I don't know the story on .nu, but I assume nu-names is more than just a company hired to run its name servers, but rather an entity that stands in the same position as ICANN. So while we may disagree with nu-names' opinion on what's best for .nu, at least everyone has agreed that nu-names' opinion is the one that matters. I assume a similar situation exists for .museum, which also has a wildcard.

If ICANN lets Verisign get away with this, then it also has to let Verisign do things like modify DNS so it works better with a Versign partner's DNS software, at the expense of everyone else's DNS software.