Thursday, 16. October 2003
Property, propriety, greed and trust
"VeriSign to revive redirect service"
Oh dear. Here we go talking about a service again. Our media friends are not helping here, seeming to begin to accept Verisign's position that they are the good guys, a nameless collection of purist Internet geeks are the bad guys and the poor old "users" are stuck in the middle.
At the risk of repeating factors which are probably now well documented elsewhere, my two cents:
Oh dear. Here we go talking about a service again. Our media friends are not helping here, seeming to begin to accept Verisign's position that they are the good guys, a nameless collection of purist Internet geeks are the bad guys and the poor old "users" are stuck in the middle.
At the risk of repeating factors which are probably now well documented elsewhere, my two cents:
- Any commercial organisation is entitled to use their own property to generate revenue; this is how capitalism works. Indeed, it would be a poor company in this day and age that failed to make their assets sweat to the fullest extent permissible.
- A lie repeated a thousand times may well become the truth in some people's minds but for me at any rate, no matter how often statements about this "service" are made, the true motive behind Sitefinder can not be hidden. It is profit.
- And if .com and .net were Verisign's assets, then Sitefinder would not only be right, it would be necessary to make those assets sweat.
- However, while .com and .net may be property, they are not Verisign's property. Rather Verisign holds them in trust and has a duty (whether actually written down somewhere or merely implied in their relationship with ICANN) to operate them in a manner commensurate with that trust.
I am now looking for alternative vendors of the services we currently buy from Verisign, primarily (and somewhat ironically) trust in the form of SSL certs. It isn't going to make a lot of difference to their bottom line, but in all conscience I cannot buy trust from an organisation which has shown itself untrustworthy.
Category: T'Internet
Technorati: T'Internet
Comments :
1. Bruce Currier16/10/2003 19:40:23
Homepage: http://www.bcworld.net
I wonder if this has anything to do with the announcement I received today from Verisign that they are selling off Network Solutions to a private investment group?
2. Chris Linfoot16/10/2003 19:55:00
Doubt it. They are selling Netsol, but retaining their role as administrator of the .com and .net TLDs 
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