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OCTOBER 20, 2003
By Alex Salkever Beyond the Verisign vs. ICANN Battle [Page 2 of 2] STUCK IN THE PAST. Then again, Verisign's claims that the Internet is paralyzed by an old guard who dominate the governance bodies such as ICANN has more than a hint of truth to it. For example, Verisign charges that ICANN's continued reliance on nonprofit and largely academic entities to maintain the DNS "root servers" that are the ultimate arbiter of Internet traffic opens the whole Net to the possibility of catastrophic failure. These entities don't have the resources of a dedicated organization focused on servicing DNS, Sclavos has claimed in several recent interviews. Verisign and others have also expressed rising concern that the Net's basic syntax is far too rooted in a different era, when just a few people could log onto the precursor to the Net. Today, the language mail servers speak to each other in passing messages back and forth and the way Web browsers request and send out information remain largely the same as when they were first planned and implemented. Engineered for a time when everyone on ArpaNet knew each other, these protocols and syntaxes seem frighteningly naïve in today's world of malicious hackers, spewing spammers, and vile Net fraudsters. The protocol to exchange mail messages between machines, SMTP, has no built-in mechanism to authenticate who a messages's sender is and verify his or her identity. This is why spam is such a problem today -- because no one has to worry about getting caught if they impersonate someone else or make up their own identity in sending an e-mail. You can't catch anyone because the SMTP protocol is designed to be flexible and allow for anominity. DANGEROUS TURF. DNS is the basic service used to more or less direct traffic around the Net. Like SMTP, it has no accepted and widely used mechanism for authenticating requests for data. In fact, very few of the prevailing syntaxes and protocols underpinning the Internet contain provisions for effective protections against network attacks, cyber or otherwise. Gently nudging the Internet community into a more secure future is ICANN's job. Yet ICANN itself and the Internet Engineering Task Force, another key governing body, have had trouble deciding among themselves on how to upgrade the Net. Meanwhile, the tide of spam threatens to deluge everyone and significantly increase costs of running networks (the ratio of spam to legitimate mail is well over 50% at this point, according to Brightmail). And hackers wielding nasty Internet worms have clearly illustrated this summer that chunks of the Internet infrastructure -- partly, but not all, due to Microsoft's (MSFT ) difficulty in building secure products -- remain wide open to cyber attacks that teenagers can easily master and execute. Instead of Verisign and ICANN slinging arrows at each other, they should be working together, along with other responsible parties, to build a better, safer, more efficient Internet.
 Salkever is Technology editor for BusinessWeek Online
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