China hates Site Finder

Technical Responses to Unilateral Internet Authority is a paper on VeriSign's Site Finder "service" by a couple of researchers at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman wanted to see how much traffic was being diverted to Site Finder due to VeriSign's hijacking of wildcards and what network operators, many of them quite upset with the whole thing, were doing about it.

VeriSign was unwilling to provide any statistics for the report, but, proving once again that the Internet can route around trouble, the two turned to Alexa, whose users voluntarily report to the service which sites they visit (via a toolbar that logs their visits to an Alexa server), which the researchers say has proven to be a reliable proxy for overall 'Net statistics. By last Friday, when VeriSign had agreed to suspend its wildcarding, roughly 9% of 'Net users no longer had any access to it anyway, because their ISPs had taken steps to block the redirection.

This was most pronounced in China, where Site Finder traffic pretty much dropped to zero: (at least, based on Alexa data):

"For example, Alexa users on the Chunghwa Telecom network viewed nearly 50,000 web pages on September 22 -- yet viewed Site Finder only once during the period from September 15 to 29."

Via John Palfrey.

Meanwhile, if you're feeling particularly anti-VeriSign, turn your sound on and head over to Public Files, where you can listen to a woman say "VeriSign is BAD" over and over (ironically, Melissa, our managing editor, discovered this when she typed in "eson.com" instead of "espn.com" ).