FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sept 19, 2003

CONTACT: Charles Oriez
coriez@denveraitp.org

AITP Statement on Verisign Top Level Domain Hijacking

On September 16, the US Department of Commerce (DOC) extended the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)'s authority to manage the Internet for three more years. Both ICANN and the DOC stressed that "the Memorandum of Understanding highlights ICANN's responsibility to ensure the stability of the Internet...". 

Ironically, at the same time that ICANN and the DOC were announcing this agreement, a serious challenge to the stability of the Internet appeared, in the form of Verisign's unilateral decision to begin providing incorrect information in answer to DNS queries for non-existent .net and .com domains, resulting in misdirected email, broken spam filters, and other problems.

This presents an immediate opportunity for ICANN to demonstrate its level of commitment to the principle of stability of the Internet in a dramatic and public fashion.

ICANN should instruct Verisign to immediately stop giving incorrect answers to any query in .com and .net, and should instead follow the IETF standards. If Verisign refuses to do so, ICANN should re-delegate the .com and .net zones to registries that are more willing to follow the standards.

about AITP

The Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP), formerly known as the Data Processing Management Association (DPMA) is one of the nation's oldest organizations of information technology professionals and managers.  http://aitp.org