Re: Verisign's public opinion play

[Declan McCullagh <lists () politechbot com>]

On Mon, Oct 06, 2003 at 11:41:14PM -0400, Mike Tancsa wrote:
> http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5087139.html?tag=nefd_top
> The article makes me wonder if CNET is the press, or an outlet for press 
> releases.  The Internet community is almost uniform in expressing outrage 
> for numerous REAL reasons, yet CNET says its from the Internet's technical 
> "old guard"....  Sorry, so where is the "new guard" calling for Verisign to 
> come back with sitefinder ?  Also CNET leaves un challenged the 'excuse of 
> the day' that Verisign without site finder "will not be able to protect the 
> Net's critical infrastructure"...

We've been covering the impact of SiteFinder since September 16. I
didn't write that article (I was in transit from a conference in
Canada) but I've written about five articles on SiteFinder so far, and
I'll probably write another today based on the ICANN committee
meeting.

Taken as a whole, I hardly think our coverage of SiteFinder is an
"outlet for press releases" from VeriSign or anyone else. Take a look
at our first article from September 16:

http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5077530.html
> Criticism is quickly growing over VeriSign's surprise decision to take
> control of all unassigned .com and .net domain names, a move that has
> wreaked havoc on many e-mail utilities and antispam filters.
> On Monday, VeriSign began to redirect domain lookups for misspelled or
> nonexistent names to its own site, a process that has confused
> Internet e-mail utilities and drawn angry denunciations of the
> company's business practices from frustrated network
> administrators. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company enjoys a
> government-granted monopoly as the master database administrator for
> .com and .net.

That said, being a news organization (instead of an advocacy
organization) means that we're going to try to represent all sides of
the story. Just as we've given space to Jack Valenti, I suspect we'll
give it to VeriSign when they have something sufficiently newsworthy
to say. As always, feel free to email us at:
send-letters-to-news at cnet.com

I hope you continue to read News.com.

Best,
Declan
CNET News.com
Washington, DC
(but speaking only for myself)