Imagine if the telephone company changed your service so that instead of a busy signal it delivers an advertisement instead. Would you be happy about that?

Well, we know that such a thing is unlikely to happen unless the FCC loses its collective minds. And that's a good thing because when it comes to the core communications infrastructure of this country, there is a fine line between what is commercially possible, and a bad idea that is not in the national or public interest.

But when it comes to the Internet, there is no FCC. There is no body with any power to stop rash commercial decisions from being put in place. Which leads me to my rant of the week: The changes to DNS that VeriSign
recently implemented.

VeriSign is the company that acquired Network Solutions - which was created from InterNIC - and inherited the right to run the root name servers.

Well, a week ago VeriSign lost its mind. It used to be that a failed DNS query would return a status of "no such name," which was useful for all sorts of reasons including, not inconsequentially, that anti-spam systems easily could detect spam that used bogus domain names.

But on Sept. 15, VeriSign turned on a new feature. Now failed DNS queries for both the .com and .net domains return an IP address for sitefinder-idn.verisign.com.

This URL is for a portal VeriSign owns and runs. The resultant Web page notifies you that the requested URL wasn't found, provides the opportunity to search the Web for any text, offers up a URL that is close to the one you typed and features a list titled "Search Popular Categories."

Click on a popular category and the page returns lists of sponsored results for that category (for example, the travel category features the usual suspects starting with Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity).

In other words, VeriSign has hijacked this process and turned it to its commercial advantage. This is not surprising considering VeriSign's recent poor financial performance, but the reason it matters is that apparently people mistype domain names an estimated 20 million times every day! VeriSign's vice president for naming services, Ben Turner, has said that Site Finder is a way to "improve overall usability of the Internet." Do I need to make a comment about that? Nope.