Verisign Profits from Domain Name Errors

VeriSign has begun to redirect misspelled, non-existent, and expired domain names to its own web site which offers corrected spellings of these names, as well as paid advertising.

Verisign enjoys a government-granted monopoly as the master database administrator for .com and .net. Some criticism is already brewing that Verisign is taking full advantage of their monopoly and serving advertising which only betters themselves.

Verisign says that it handles over 20 million incorrect queries each day. Put a price tag on these mistakes, and that’s a petty penny earned for for a government granted service. What this will be leading to, may be a war over these nonexistent domain names between Verisign, AOL, Microsoft, and other Internet Service Providers and hosting companies.

According to a statement released by Verisign, “Verisign’s Site finder service improves the user web browsing experience when the user has submitted a query for a nonexistent second-level domain name in the .com and .net top level domains. …(Previously) his or her Web browser returned an error message that contained no useful information.”

Verisign has not disclosed the revenue that it will earn from the search engine and paid for advertising search queries than result in this service. Although VeriSign gets unspecified revenues from search engine partners whose technology powers Site Finder, company officials described the service as primarily a navigation tool to help lost Internet users.

Two Yahoo companies are providing the technology and advertising which drives the new VeriSign service. Inktomi Corp., Yahoo a search technology company, and Overture Services Inc., a a paid search placement service, is the other.

Critics, however, say the service eliminates user choice, gives a private company too much control over online commerce and could violate longstanding Internet standards.

For those who do not want Verisign to profit off of their misspellings, the Internet Software Consortium has introduced a new version of their BIND software which blocks such advertising messages. AOL and some versions of Internet Explorer already have their own misspelled and nonexistent domain name search results and advertising tools. On some versions of IE, the Verisign Site Finder actually overrides previously existent error page search results.

It will be interesting to see how AOL and Microsoft respond to this new threat, and whether the government will let Verisign profit off of the mistakes of the public.

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