Really, it’s a very clever solution to the problem. By declaring .net and .com zones as delegation only, they essentially force only NXDOMAIN records to be returned in the case of something other than a NS record coming back (namely, an A record).

Of course, I’m wondering if VeriSign is going to escalate this. They very well might, since money is involved, and they technically could get around this (and it would be pretty easy for them to do so as well). Things would only get worse at that point, and then ICANN would potentially have to get involved…ugh. Let’s see what happens from this point onward, but I applaud ICS for making such a wonderfully elegant solution to this problem.

As a final note, djbdns also has released a patch for this.