On Mon, 15 Sep 2003, Alex Lambert wrote:
"The information provided through the VeriSign Services is not necessarily complete and may be supplied by VeriSign's commericial licensors, advertisers or others."
There's something immoral about *shoving it down our throats*, then, VeriSign.
Nice terms of service at http://sitefinder.verisign.com/terms.jsp : The VeriSign Services are provided only for your personal and non-commercial use. You are not authorized to modify, copy, display, transmit, license, create derivative works from, transfer, distribute or sell any information, software, products or services obtained from the services VeriSign provides through this web site. You may not "meta-search" the VeriSign Services. If you want to make commercial use of the VeriSign Services, you must enter into an agreement with us to do so in advance. so... umh... I can't display any information from their website. And can only use it for non-commercial use. So... if I make a DNS query for some "commercial" purpose (whatever that means), and get a response and then connect to that IP on port 80 and send a request, and get a redirect to this sitefinder.verisign.com site, and follow it... I'm violating their terms of use. Does the contract under which NSI is operating .com and .net require that people be able to use the results of their queries for non-personal and commercial use? It is a little fuzzy how directly you can relate the DNS response to the terms of use on the website you get redirected to on the legal level, but it seems that since Verisign is operating it with the intent that people entering unknown domains into a webbrowser get redirected there, then they are by implication stating that people doing things for non-personal or commercial purposes must never enter such names. Sure, it is a ridiculous terms of use that wouldn't be likely to hold up very well, but would the fact that they are making that claim have any implication on if they are meeting the stated or implied terms of their contract with ICANN?