Earlier this week, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) published a draft of an "explanatory memorandum" for a proposed clause that prohibits the managers of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) as well as IDN country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) from redirecting users when they try to access a nonexistent domain name.
Verisign, the operator of the .com and .net gTLDs, ran such a system under the name Site Finder for several weeks, until criticism from the community made them turn it off.
Systems like Site Finder work by modifying DNS servers to respond with an IP address rather than an NXDOMAIN error message whenever a request arrives for a domain name that doesn't exist. The IP address belongs to a Web server that serves up a page explaining that the domain doesn't exist, with helpful links to guesses as to what the user may have been looking for. Oh yes, and ads. There are some problems with this, but first an ICANN refresher.
A top-level domain is the last part of a domain name, and it comes in two flavors: generic ones, such as .com, .net, .biz, .museum, and country codes, such as .us, .mx, and .fr. Now that it is finally possible to create ccTLDs in non-latin scripts through Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), we can expect new ccTLDs for countries like Russia and Japan. So there will be new contracts between ICANN, which is in charge of the "root" of the domain name system, and the organizations managing the new IDN ccTLDs, which will have the redirection prohibition clause. Also, as of next year, ICANN's plans for lots of new gTLDs will materialize, which will also require a new contract each. For existing TLDs, ICANN strongly discourages the practice, but that's as far as ICANN goes.
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