Security management Toolkit

VeriSign's CEO hits back at critics

Tags:
Root Servers,
Security,
Verisign,
Attack

Charles Cooper

Published: 17 Oct 2003 12:35 BST

You temporarily suspended Site Finder in reaction to widespread criticism. What's the next step?
The reason Site Finder became such a lightening rod is that it goes to the question: are we going to be in a position to do innovation on this infrastructure, or are we going to be locked into obsolete thinking that the DNS was never intended to do anything other than what it was originally supposed to do?

Still, a lot of people in the Internet community were quite surprised by Site Finder -- and then you had complaints surfacing that it was not complying to approved standards.
Let's break the argument down: the claim that Site Finder was nonstandard and that we should have informed the community that we were doing something nonstandard -- excuse me: Site Finder is completely compliant to standards that have been out and published by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) for years. That's just a misnomer. The IAB (Internet Architecture Board) in its review of Site Finder said the very same thing -- that VeriSign was adhering to standards.

The second claim, that we brought it out without testing -- Site Finder had been operational since March or April, and we had been testing it with individual companies and with the DNS traffic at large. Ninety-nine percent of the traffic is pure HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol), and so it handles it the way it should. Just so you know, our customer service lines went from 800 or 900 calls on the first day to almost zero right now. For every customer who had a Site Finder issue, the remediation took less than 12 hours.

Why, then, do you think there was such a strong reaction?
The noise you're hearing publicly does not match the real impact of the system. It's standards-compliant. We have asked for the data five times from anyone who has it -- ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the IAB -- and no one can produce data. All they can produce is these fringe stories.

We absolutely should have done a much broader outreach on this. I am very concerned that we have a disconnect between those who think that they are developing standards for the betterment of the network and the community and the users of the network.

You're hinting at a cultural divide?
I think that there is. I don't think it's an intentional divide, but it's drifting apart of the day-to-day usage from the folks who did great steward's work in the early days and were asked to define all the standards to make it work.

And those are the people who still dominate the standards bodies?
They're speaking out of both sides of their mouth right now. It's not OK to say standards are important, unless we don't like someone who implemented it. And it's not OK to say these services at the core should not be built out, unless you're one of the small guys and nobody really cares. How do we build a commercial business with ground rules that seem to shift based on personal agenda and emotion versus any particular logical data set?

But you had to expect get this kind of criticism, didn't you?
And we're out trying to defend ourselves. The one thing I'd question is there doesn't seem to be a process to effectively combat the claims and accusations and the rest. That is what ICANN is supposed to be about: transparent processes that lead to consensus. What we're seeing are predetermined opinions masquerading as processes where the outcome is predetermined. And that's what I resent.

Do you think ICANN needs to be reformed?
It needs to be reformed. It's nobody's fault, but ICANN was designed at a time that was very different from today. It was designed when domains were going up and Network Solutions was the monopoly for the whole thing. So the idea to create competition on the front end and introduce new extensions on the back end seemed like a good idea, when there didn't seem to be any stopping to the growth in names.

Four years later, things are very much changed. Domain names have been flat for the longest time. If I were in ICANN's shoes, I'd want to put forth a charter of promoting innovation, stability and competition. It was really designed to promote competition, and frankly, it did it haphazardly, because it was in such a rush.

This isn't the first time people have called for ICANN to evolve. What's the holdup?
It's very difficult to have the people who built the infrastructure originally also be the reformers of it. That is one of the challenges they will run in to. It's mostly a collection of very technical people and a lot of lawyers. What you don't have are a lot of people who understand how to build products and promote markets. We'd prefer ICANN to become more of a trade association that promotes the growth of the network rather than a regulatory body that seems to have a very difficult time getting anything done.