Jeff Neuman, inhouse counsel for Neulevel urges ICANN to "keep an open mind" when it comes to studying Sitefinder. Surprisingly, he has put forward a technically flawed argument that does little to support his points. On a day when half of the internet's smartest engineers are pointing out dozens of different applications and processes that have been broken by Verisign's actions, its hard to believe a lawyer that is arguing the opposite.

[excerpted]

"Do those who use MSN browser "choose" to get an MSN search redirect rather than an error message? And what is to stop other browsers from doing the same thing. Lets get past emotion and get the true real concrete facts out on the table. Yes, there are applications out there that depend on the error message. However, these applications can easily be updated to accomplish the same functionality. There are two sides to every coin. Are you also examining the benefit to the common Internet user that may be looking for a place to go on the Internet and cannot find his or her way? What about the benefits of a search engine to make the Web more easily navigable? The VeriSign service has been alive and well for 24 hours? Did the Internet break? One last note.....to show that the MX records are still returning errors, I have attached an error e-mail message which took less than 4.5 seconds to get returned to my inbox (yes, I did time it). I would say the Internet as we know it is alive and well."

First and foremost, of course browser users have a choice. Mozilla and Opera are still alive and well and definitely not supporting the exact same feature set as Microsoft. Second, breaking applications without prior notice "just because" is simply unacceptable behavior for a registry operator. These are the same registries that just recently complained that application developers weren't interoperable with new TLDs. I guess interoperability just isn't important this month. Lastly, we're not worried that mail exchangers are returning error messages, we're worried that they're not returning the right error messages.

Shall we even get into whether or not focusing on "web navigation" (which has precisely what to do with DNS resolution?) should be done at the expense of applications developers, network managers, intellectual property holders and average users everywhere? The internet isn't alive and well. Until registry operators start behaving like they are part of the internet and start working within it, the internet is terminally ill.