ICANN | Letter from Russell Lewis to Paul Twomey | 21 September 2003
  ICANN Logo Letter from Russell Lewis to Paul Twomey
21 September 2003

21 September 2003

VIA E-MAIL &
VIA FASILMILE (310) 823-8649

Paul Twomey
President and CEO
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 330
Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6601

Re: ICANN Advisory Concerning VeriSign's Deployment of DNS Wildcard Service dated 19 September 2003

Dear Paul:

This will respond to the ICANN Advisory concerning VeriSign's Deployment of DNS Wildcard Service dated 19 September 2003. In the footsteps of several other registries that have done the same, we recently deployed a wildcard in the .com and .net zones. This was done after many months of testing and analysis and in compliance with all applicable technical standards. All indications are that users, important members of the internet community we all serve, are benefiting from the improved web navigation offered by Site Finder. These results are consistent with the findings from the extensive research we performed.

We are, of course, very interested in any objective technical information ICANN may have received concerning the service and would welcome the opportunity to work with you to review such data. To that end, we have reached out to schedule meetings with ICANN’s Chairman, Vint Cerf, and the Chairman of ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee, Steve Crocker, to exchange information regarding issues that may be encountered in the community. We have also formed an independent technical review panel to gather and analyze data for the purpose of assessing any operational impact of our wildcard implementation. The technical review panel will consist of leading experts in the field.

As to your call for us to suspend the service, I would respectfully suggest that it would be premature to decide on any course of action until we first have had an opportunity to collect and review the available data. After completing an assessment of any operational impact of our wildcard implementation, we will take any appropriate steps necessary.

I look forward to continuing to work with you on this issue.

Best Regards,

Russell Lewis
Executive Vice President, General Manager
VeriSign Naming and Directory Services


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