By Declan McCullagh, 1 March 2004 08:55
NEWS The non-profit organisation with the task of overseeing the core function of the internet said on Friday that it was "disappointed" by a lawsuit filed by VeriSign, which operates the master database for .com and .net.
VeriSign on Thursday sued the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) in federal court in Los Angeles, claiming it was unlawfully prevented from adding new features to the domain name database it has a contract to run. Last fall, Icann ordered VeriSign to halt its Site Finder service, which redirected nonexistent domain names to the company's website and caused problems for some network administrators.
"Icann has worked closely with VeriSign and the other registries for the past several years," the non-profit group said in a statement Friday. "Therefore, Icann is disappointed that VeriSign has again chosen confrontation over consensus."
VeriSign's lawsuit was filed just three days before the start of Icann's meeting in Rome, which begins Sunday. It claims that Icann has transformed itself over the last six years from a modest technical coordinating body into the "de facto regulator of the domain name system" and alleges breach of contract and antitrust violations. The lawsuit asks for an injunction against Icann.
"We have still to receive any information saying that Site Finder was going to be a threat to the stability or security of the Internet," Tom Galvin, VeriSign's vice president for government relations, said Thursday. Galvin said that the two organisations had been butting heads for years, and VeriSign eventually "realised our best option was to try to get some sort of clarity in the legal sense."
The lawsuit comes as Icann's control of Internet addresses and domain names - it is tasked with adding new ones such as .museum and .biz - is being challenged. On Thursday, the United Nations' International Telecommunication Union held a "workshop on internet governance" in Geneva.
Declan McCullagh writes for CNET News.com
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1. anonymous
Verisign is overstepping it's boundaries by introducing anything other than improvements to their current core registry duties. For instance why not improve the updating of DNS propogation to immediate change rather than once a day.
Verisign wants the world to think it is losing money which they may be but just as anyone does in business they need to make changes in their business model to make a profit. Not introduce services that are already in place by many of the companies they provide core registry services for in the first place. Verisign reminds me of the Bush administration's reduce tax and spend as much as possible plan. Which we will all pay for in the end, literally..
What proof does Versign have that sitefinder benefits anyone other than themselves. A user might click on a competitors site instead of the site they were actually looking for and in turn earn Versign money and loose the intended site business. In addition to reducing the amount of money being made by companies that offer this service as it is.
In fact let's say the user type's in a misspelling of the intended site. The site advertise's with the the service that provides the backend of site finder. Now that customer would be paying Verisign money for a customer it would have had anyway.