ICANN has finally grown a spine. The President and CEO of ICANN has written an open letter to the General Manager of Verisign's Naming and Directory serivce in which he issues an ultimatum: get rid of the evilly asinine SiteFinder service (which breaks the Internet by redirecting all misspelled domain-requests to an ad-ware site) by Oct 4, or ICANN will "seek promptly to enforce VeriSign's contractual obligations." Apparently, this is ICANN-speak for "terminate with extreme prejudice."
[…O]ur review of the .com and .net registry agreements between ICANN and VeriSign leads us to the conclusion that VeriSign's unilateral and unannounced changes to the operation of the .com and .net Top Level Domains are not consistent with material provisions of both agreements. These inconsistencies include violation of the Code of Conduct and equal access provisions, failure to comply with the obligation to act as a neutral registry service provider, failure to comply with the Registry Registrar Protocol, failure to comply with domain registration provisions, and provision of an unauthorized Registry Service. These inconsistencies with VeriSign's obligations under the .com and .net registry agreements are additional reasons why the changes in question must be suspended pending further evaluation and discussion between ICANN and VeriSign.
(Thanks, Hal!)
