Actually, a co-worker and I were discussing this just the other day when he noted that the domains were all resolving to the same IP.

In a calmer frame of mind at the time than I was when I wrote the above, I suggested that it might not even be quite so bad if they promised to keep the fakey IP the same. It would still take a lot of code repair to make things work in the expected way again, but it would be fixable at least. So I thought.

But in retrospect, they have blatantly abused their power. No one else can say "abracadabra ... domains I don't own are now my own advertising portals!" Only VeriSign can ... and therefore, shouldn't. They've been given a ... well, if not sacred, at least special trust to curate the TLD system. And they've hijacked it for their own profit. In a way that no one can compete with.

That's a monopoly, and that is, if not illegal, then ethically questionable.