Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Uk.com wildcard raises Net stability worries

Kieren McCarthy writes in The Register:

A decision by British company CentralNic to make all unregistered domains ending with "uk.com" direct to its own webpage has raised concerns over the future stability of the Internet.

CentralNic owns a series of valuable dotcoms including uk.com, us.com, eu.com and de.com and sells third-level domains e.g. www.theregister.uk.com to anyone for £32.50 a year. It runs around 100,000 domains.

However, no matter what domain you type in your browser (i.e. www.fskjsdkjkjsd.uk.com), so long as it hasn't been sold, you will redirected to CentralNic's own webpage, featuring advertising and an offer to buy that domain through its system.

The benefit to the company is clear - increased sales and advertising revenue - but the system by which the redirection is carried out, called wildcard, has been criticised by the Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) of Internet overseeing organisation ICANN as putting the stability of the Internet at risk.

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