"Brian Gibbons"
Don't forget that up until now Microsoft owned the World Wide Web.
Type this into IE www.dfghjkl.co.nz, rather than getting a DNS error you end up at Xtra MSN, thus Microsoft have built logic into IE to redirect non existant domain errors to a Microsoft MSN affiliate.
So you could say that Verisign is just playing the same game that Microsoft has been playing.
Absolutely not. As others pointed out, this can be turned off or modified by the user. But the important thing is that the way IE handles unresolved domains *only* affects Web queries through IE; it's purely an application level function, which is entirely appropriate. (Personally, I find IE's going to the search page annoying, and I turn it off, and if I couldn't I could always use a different browser. Which I usually do anyway. Choice is good.) What Verisign have done is unilaterally changed the behaviour of all applications using NET & COM DNS lookups, and that is a Very Bad Thing. -- don