For a little while, not too long ago, when you typed in a URL in the address bar of your browser, and you made an error in the address, you might have ended up at a search engine.

The search engine was one run by Verisign, and it wasn’t one that you decided upon yourself, or that you could opt out of going to.

It provided a way to search for the right address, or to click upon ads that were possibly paid for from other companies.

How did Verisign get the power to display this search engine where previously you might see an error message? It appears that they were taking economic advantage of their “stewardship” of the routing of visitors to web destinations. Type in an address that doesn’t exist, get redirected to Verisign’s search engine.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), who exist to attempt to oversee such issues have issued an 85 page long report condemning Versign for their Site Finder search engine.

The report, Redirection in the COM and NET Domains, is long, but very readable. Here’s a snippet:

Ultimately, the matter is one of fostering and sustaining trust. Most Web and e-mail end users have seen error messages when a name fails to resolve. These error messages usually come either as a Web page displayed on their browsers, perhaps supported by a well-known search service, or as a bounced message in their e-mail in-boxes. And many, if not most, end users know the rough contours of the explanation: That the name is supposed to correspond to a sequence of numbers that represent an address and that the registry databases maintain the relationship between the name and the address.

I think that level of trust is something that it is necessary and important to maintain. It’s at the very core of internet usage, that the companies that provide important services at the core level of service don’t attempt to take advantage of us. Nice document from ICANN.

If you have an interest in the governance of the internet, and the struggle between different forces to control the traffic upon the web, there are a lot of interesting statements and comments in the ICANN report.