Sad: it took ICANN threatening to revoke VeriSign’s control of the .com top-level domain to get the evil clowns to correct glaring problems in its database of information about who owns what domains.

Sadder: out of the seventeen examples of errors, nine of them remain uncorrected (and two more are only “corrected” in that VeriSign’s nameservers point at themselves, causing a self-recursive nightmare that prevents the domains from being resolved at all). Yes, folks, you did that division correctly — at best, VeriSign’s got a 53% failure rate, and we’re talking about the company that controls the largest single top-level domain on the Internet.

By my count, the deadline set by ICANN will be upon us in nine days (September 18th). As we get closer, I find myself wondering if the body has the strength to adhere to its threat…