Verisign CEO on SiteFinder
January 17, 2005Q: Site Finder — your product that referred people who mistyped a domain to a search engine that included advertising from which you could profit — that did generate a lot of consumer backlash.
A: Let me stop you there. If there was true consumer backlash, we would have taken it down in five minutes. We surveyed millions of consumers. Eighty- four percent of them thought the service was much better than what their experience had been without it, meaning that either you get an error page because you typed in the wrong thing, or you get a very similar service to ours, from Microsoft or AOL. So when people say there was a big consumer backlash, that’s really not quite true. There was an Internet technical community backlash to it because it wasn’t what they were used to. It really was 200 people stepping in to try to govern what 751 million people used. Quite frankly, we don’t think it was representative of what Internet (users) would have done. We’ve invested millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars in these services and we’d like to build new services on top of them that have some customer value. We believe Site Finder was one of those. I think we’re still in the early stages of governance on the Internet, and I don’t think ICANN has yet found a model that works well. In the three years since we started designing international domain names and the three years since we started designing a wait-list service so people could reserve names as other people give them up, two dozen companies have gotten into those businesses, and we’re still waiting to launch the service, because ICANN has one more hoop for us to jump through. So it’s a very odd system where we’re supposed to tell our competitors everything we’re going to do years before we get to launch a service. It’s not commercially reasonable.
The full interview is available here.
