VeriSign has responded to a deadline from Internet quango ICANN and today suspended its SiteFinder service. SiteFinder redirected DNS wildcards, such as misspelled URLs, to Verisign's own website, a practice which breaches time-honored Internet behavior. The move broke many spam filters and in its brief life - it was launched on September 15 - had generated three lawsuits.

Verisign was able to do this because it has a monopoly on the .com and .net domains, one granted to it by ICANN. ICANN said Verisign was in breach of this contract.

"Sorry for nothing," a VeriSign spokesperson replied today.

He didn't actually use those words, but instead accused ICANN of finding "anecdotal and isolated issues to attempt to regulate non-registry services," before conceding, "but in the interests of further working with the technical community, we will temporarily suspend SiteFinder."

Which is much the same thing. ®

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