I'm not sure if he'll publish it, but here's a note I sent to Dave Farber's IP list this morning about the ongoing debate over Verisign's Sitefinder service.

Dave Farber wrote:
I would consider ICANNs response to this issue to be a very good indicator of their ability to be a guardian of the DNS. If they don't take a strong position, I will read that as yet another bad bad sign.

Dave (and for IP),

This is an appropriate time for people to consider the scope of ICANN's mission and what it's role should be. If it's your view that ICANN should really be the "guardian of the DNS," just how would you propose to scope that? On the one hand, ICANN has been mercilessly criticized over the years for engaging in "mission creep" for things like promulgating the UDRP and attempting to coerce ccTLD managers into signing regulatory-style contracts. It's also been accused of thwarting innovation by preventing ready, willing and able registry operators from launching new gTLDs. Can we reconcile those criticisms with the call for ICANN to prevent Verisign from rolling out a new service?

Make no mistake, I'm no fan of this new "service." But should ICANN step in to stop it? Why not let market forces sort this out. Yes, I realize that moving from .com to .biz, .info or a country-code is not a practical solution for many business users, but perhaps people should start thinking about their options over the longer term and consider alternatives to the services they don't like. Placing ICANN in the role of arbiter of new DNS services has its own problems, and relying on market forces, slow as they may be, is perhaps the lesser of two evils.

-- Bret Fausett