By Sally Watson, 20 March 2000 17:10
NEWS Domain name registrar Network Solutions (NSI) faces a fresh court battle this week, less than a month after the US Department of Justice (DoJ) dropped its anti-trust investigation into the company. NSI, which was bought by security software firm VeriSign earlier this month for $21bn, is being sued for a refund of £800m in registration fees and £900m in anti-trust damages. The eight plaintiffs - which include software firm Knowledge View Technologies and networking specialist Design One - claim their case is broader in scope than the DoJ's. According to William Bode, prosecuting attorney, the suit also contains the new claim that NSI deliberately failed to observe the protocols describing the top-level domains dot-com, dot-net and dot-org. "The protocols explicitly required that dot-com be devoted to commercial use by commercial entities," Bode said in a statement. "In breach of its contract with the government, NSI permitted and, indeed, now encourages commercial entities to enroll in all three generic top level domains. This is a patent abuse of monopoly power."
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