ICANN has finished its technical review of Verisign's controversial SiteFinder service. (ICANN logo from InetConcepts.)

Bottom line: Big Mistake.

SiteFinder was designed to take misspelled domain requests to a Verisign page, backed by advertising, where users would be given choices for where the might want to go. As The Register properly headlined it, "All Your Web Typos Belong To Us."

What could be wrong with that, given that Verisign is registrar for the .com and .net domains in question? Plenty, the ICANN Committee found:

• The change to SiteFinder was made suddenly and without notice.
• The change impacted all Internet services, or "layers," not just http requests. For instance, e-mail sent to wrong addresses was misdirected, causing huge headaches, especially since spam is often deliberately misaddressed.
• All the patches and workarounds to the problems caused by SiteFinder caused their own problems. When the fixes were good, they were put in without notice, as Sitefinder itself was, causing collateral damage. And when they were bad they were awful.
• Verisign was collecting personal information from users without their knowledge or consent, because Verisign logged all activity on the SiteFinder site.
• All this undermined public confidence in the Internet governance system.

Verisign critics made all these points when SiteFinder was created, and have made them since. In essence ICANN found Verisign guilty of all charges. (Verisign logo from CNN.)

And the penalty for creating all this havoc?

Nothing. No penalty to Verisign is specified, or even hinted again. Just don't do this again without telling us, Verisign is told. Or what? Or nothing.

And that is the problem. In fact ICANN doesn't really run anything. ICANN has a contract with Verisign, which runs everything important. ICANN can't cancel that contract without doing massive damage to the system. Any threat to do so is empty.

So who runs the Internet? Verisign does. And Verisign has proven itself unworthy of that charge, according to this report.

What happens now?