The Intarweb (sic) is a small in-joke among the geek set. It’s a dig at the web-is-the-internet attittude prevalent among large numbers of newbie net-users. Today, however, the Intarweb is one step closer to reality, thanks to one of the companies charged with one of the crucial pieces of the Net’s infrastructure — and ICANN, the organization responsible for Internet names, is asleep at the wheel as usual.

Starting today, all nonexistent entries in the .com and .net top-level-domains will resolve to a Verisign server called sitefinder. From an viewpoint of an interactive (”Intarweb”) user, this may seem harmless enough, but this makes life much more difficult for the anti-spam community, network operators and ISPs, not to mention hapless developers who now have to add && !(isWildcardAddress()) snippets all over their host lookup code.

Technically, if implemented right (which it isn’t — sitefinder’s Mail Reject Daemon seems to be a flawed SMTP implementation), Verisign will not “break standards”. DNS does allow for top-level wildcards, but this move is bad for users from many practical standpoints, including privacy and flexibility. Verisign’s best practices document (PDF) notes that several other TLD operators provide such a service as well, for example the .nu domain takes you to a generic page for sites which don’t exist. Which is fine, except that vanity domains like .nu don’t get used anywhere as much as the staples of .com and .net, and does not change the fact that wildcards are not a good idea at any gTLD level anyway.

PS. chaoszone is a dot-org, the registry of which is maintained by ISOC, not Verisign. Misspelt dot-orgs are not likely to get you misleading pages anytime soon.