ICANN warns about DNS redirects

THE INTERNET CORPORATION for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which as its name suggests is in charge of the world wide web, sort of, has condemned the practice of redirecting Internet users to a third-party website or portal when they misspell a web address or type a domain name that does not exist.

ICANN fears that the practice, dubbed domain name server (DNS) redirects or NXDOMAIN substitution, could eventually break the Internet as it causes a few unnecessary problems.

It thinks that users sending email to a domain that does not exist should get an immediate error message, but if it is sent to a site set up to handle web traffic, it's likely to get queued and an error message won't arrive for days.

Users will get longer response times if the site to which they're supposed to be redirected goes down. Redirection sites are also a security nightmare because they are good targets for hackers who want to redirect users to server traps.

ICANN is considering banning the practice and is mentioning it in the draft of a new statement that the owners of new domain names will have to sign.

Like most things that make sense, however, the idea is so watered down that ICANN might as well not bother. Under the latest ICANN rules domain owners wishing to redirect DNS requests may explain why doing so won't cause any problems. µ