Networks evade VeriSign's SiteFinder

Last Friday, VeriSign bowed to public outcry and temporarily pulled the plug on SiteFinder, which redirected Internet traffic to nonexistent .com and .net domain names to the company's own advertising site. Even before that step was taken, network administrators had disabled SiteFinder for about 9 percent of all Internet users, according to a new study released on Monday by Harvard University's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society.

The study used data gathered by Alexa, which makes a browser plug-in that tracks total visits to Web sites, to evaluate which networks had disabled SiteFinder to restore normal service. About half of the blocking comes from China, with most of the rest originating in nations such as Greece, Korea and Russia, the study found.

"Some ISPs (Internet service providers) did block SiteFinder," said Ben Edelman, the principal author of the report and a student fellow at the Berkman Centre. "Outside of the United States, it seems to be particularly common. These folks seem to be unhappy with what VeriSign has been doing."

Edelman said, however, that American companies were not very aggressive in blocking SiteFinder. "I don't have a US ISP that was blocking and is currently blocking SiteFinder," Edelman said. "I don't have any other US ISPs on the list, which could either be an error -- though I don't think so -- or big US ISPs were not interested in blocking the service. It was a little bit of a surprise to us at the very least."

A VeriSign spokesman said on Monday that he needed more time to review the study. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the group that oversees the Internet's domain name system and successfully prodded VeriSign to suspend SiteFinder, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an unprecedented move, Icann's security and stability advisory committee is holding an emergency meeting on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., to discuss SiteFinder.

According to the data supplied by Alexa and analysed by Edelman and Harvard faculty member Jonathan Zittrain, the overall traffic ranking of VeriSign.com jumped from rank 1,559 to rank 19 on the first day of SiteFinder's launch, and the site now garners 37 million daily visitors, up tenfold from before SiteFinder's introduction. It also shows that MSN's traffic dipped from 237 million to 218 million visitors per day after SiteFinder's launch -- reflecting less use of Internet Explorer's own domain-name-not-found redirection feature.

VeriSign's new policy is intended to generate more advertising revenue from additional visitors to its network of Web sites. But the change has had the side effect of rewiring a portion of the Internet that software designers always had expected to behave a certain way, snarling anti-spam mechanisms that check to see if the sender's domain exists, complicating the analysis of network problems, and possibly even polluting search engine results.

In an unusual grassroots movement, some network administrators have adopted technical countermeasures against VeriSign. A typical one has been to install a modified version of BIND, the standard utility used for Internet domain-name lookups.