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VeriSign Sued Over SiteFinder Service
dmehus writes "It was only a matter of time, the pundits said, and they were right. Popular Enterprises, LLC., an Orlando, Florida based cybersquatting so-called 'search services' company, has filed a lawsuit in Orlando federal court against VeriSign, Inc. over VeriSign's controversial SiteFinder 'service.' While PopularEnterprises has had a dodgy history of buying up thousands of expired domain names and redirecting them to its Netster.com commercial "search services" site, the lawsuit is most likely a good thing, as it provides one more avenue to pursue in getting VeriSign to terminate SiteFinder. According to the lawsuit, the company contends alleges antitrust violations, unfair competition and violations of the Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. It asks the court to order VeriSign to put a halt to the service. VeriSign spokesperson Brian O'Shaughnessy said the company has not yet seen the lawsuit and that it doesn't comment on pending litigation."
Homesteading required that the homesteader develop and improve the property in order to receive title. You had to actually live on the land, and farm it, and build a house with a door and window, and after you had proved the land, you would receive title.
Cybersquatters do no such thing. There's a difference between registering coffee.com to build a coffee site and registering www.coffee.com to resell it later. Cybersquatters are more akin to ticket scalpers than to homesteaders.
Where have you been? Have you noticed the fact that it's important to be able to tell when a site doesn't exist? That this crap means typos can cripple most e-mail servers? That it invalidates a good section of the RFCs the Internet itself was based on???
Wake up. If you want to find a site, you use Google. If you want to go to a non-existant one, you should damn well be told there's nothing there.
Verisign has just acquired more domain names than there are atoms in the universe. If Mountain View wanted them they'd have to pay more money than exists, whereas it only cost versign a line in their DNS records.
This is clearly abuse of monopoly.
First off, the idea that Verisign can appropriate unregistered domains represents a huge conflict of interest with its management of the TLDs. Nobody should be able to reassign IPs for non-registered domains. This undermines the whole system, which has facilities to address this situation.
The fact that ICANN didn't block this move is further evidence than this organization is totally useless and political.
Along the same vein, I disagree with MS's misleading implementation of the IP-not-found error page to redirect users to their proprietary search engine.
The Internet community should rally against any entity that seeks to appropriate undefined address space for their own gain.
If Verisign is allowed to do this, what we're likely to see is each major ISP and browser manufacturer follow suit and hijack undefined space to promote their own systems.
Imagine if you dialed a wrong number on the telephone and you got an advertisement for the phone company. What if local broadcasters bombarded all the unused frequency spectrum with their own promotions.
This has less to do with Verisign than it does to protect the sanctity of null space.
It makes me wonder if someone has a patent on silence yet?
When Verisign was given the authority to manage DNS for these TLDs, they were given this responsibility with the public trust.. The public trusted them NOT to do things exactly like this. You should do DNS, and that's it - nothing more, nothing less. In return, Verisign was given a source of income. I think that if Verisign continues in this way, it may be time to take back this thing entrusted to them. This has become yet another disaster in "privatization", and we should maybe consider moving this service back to the "public" sector (as much as it can be...).