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3rd Lawsuit Against VeriSign Seeks Class Action
dmehus writes "A third lawsuit has been filed late Friday in a federal district court in California against VeriSign, Inc. over its controversial DNS wildcard redirection service known as SiteFinder. According to the article, it was filed by longtime Internet litigator Ira Rothken. In addition, while two other lawsuits have been filed by Go Daddy Software, Inc. and Popular Enterprises, LLC. in Arizona and Florida, this is the first lawsuit to seek class-action status."
Verisign truly has no shame, but the reason they can get away with this is simple: most people on the net now are new to it, and have not the faintest idea about how the net used to be a cooperative medium, where bullshit like this was not tolerated. Today? No such luck, users expect to be scammed and abused with every click, they will accept this, and they are the majority.
Recently, the .museum TLD went live. It's just like any other TLD except that domains that don't exist diect you to a page saying the domain doesn't exist and with a couple of links. Many other countries also do this sort of thing with their domains. They're not very different than Verisign's SIteFinder, but there's little to no outcry over this. I'm curious because a lot of the objections about SiteFinder should also be true about the .museum TLD and all the others. What's different here?
And don't tell me because nobody uses those domains, that it's okay. That's just an elitist view and also blatant hypocrisy.
Can one get in trouble for launching a DOS attack on an unassigned web address? Do they all by default belong to Veri$ign (OK, I couldn't resist porting the obligitory $, generally reserved for M$), or are they fair game to hit with reckless abandon?