the company i buy my domain name through is currently sueing verisign about this.
got a email like a week ago, luckily i've never been affected by thier evil ways yet.
PHP Code:
Dear Valued Go Daddy Customer,
Have you ever needed to ask for directions while you were driving?
Let's say you stopped to ask a trusted authority, like a police officer.
You'd expect that officer to be honest, right? Wouldn't you expect him or
her to provide you a safe, direct route to where you needed to go? I sure would.
But what if that officer instead misdirected you to a shopping mall?
A shopping mall, it turns out, that actually paid the officer for every sale that resulted?
That would be an abuse of the police officer's authority.
It would be capitalizing on your misfortune.
We believe that's what VeriSign is doing with its "Site Finder" marketing scheme.
We believe that it is once again abusing the power to oversee all .com and .net domains
it was granted by the U.S. government.
Go Daddy is now suing in federal court to stop them.
Here's how VeriSign's scheme can affect you:
It will misdirect you from your intended destination and even mislead you about its status.
If you type any .com or .net address into your browser that isn't already registered,
VeriSign hijacks you — and sends you to an advertising page that they own. This can occur
even when you type in a site that is registered, but is not displaying temporarily.
Used to be, if you made a mistake in typing an address – which is the usual reason for not
finding a site – you would see either a "404" error page, or a help page that your browser
would generate. Now though, VeriSign has hijacked this entire process and puts up a paid-advertising
page, the so-called Site Finder.
It will cost you money. Advertisers pay VeriSign to position links to their services
that look similar to the misspelled address. And that means you may well find your way
to a competitor, rather than to your intended destination. Simply navigating on the Internet
will be more frustrating and more expensive for consumers. Companies will be forced to purchase
every imaginable misspelling of their names to prevent their customers from being hijacked
by Site Finder, and the cost will be passed on to you. To VeriSign, of course, these forced
domain registrations just mean more revenue.
It will mean more spam headed for your inbox. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) across
the globe have committed valuable time and resources to developing systems that prevent
spam from reaching your mailbox. One of the more successful methods checks to see whether
the domain name of the inbound email resolves to an actual Web site. If it doesn't, that
means the domain is fake, so your ISP doesn't let it through. Now, though, spammers can
use any phony domains they want, because all fake domains will "resolve" to the Site Finder page!
We're asking a Federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction that will halt this.
If you feel, as we do, that VeriSign is once again inappropriately capitalizing on its
position of authority, we urge you to email VeriSign and ICANN and let them know
Ignore the odd highlighting of words, i chosed to use PHP and not CODE, since they changed the way [ code ] looks , it takes up waaay much room. its also pretty hard to read.