Verisign Sues ICANN Over SiteFinder

camusflage writes "Yahoo's running a story about VeriSign suing ICANN for holding up Sitefinder. Choice quote from VeriSign: 'This brazen attempt by ICANN to assume 'regulatory power' over VeriSign's business is a serious abuse of ICANN's technical coordination function.'"

Comments

I'd would say...

[clifgriffin]

That Verisign's site finder is a brazen abuse of their power as a service provider.

It's a cheap ploy to get billions of hits to a VeriSign controlled page.

I have 0 respect for Verisign...they have long established they will discard customer concern for any perceived increase in money.

Re:I'd would say...

[nutznboltz]

Just put together CGIs that produce lots of invalid E-mail addresses that appear real and wait for them to be harvested by SPAMbots. Eventually there would be an awful lot of SPAM being sent to the One True Incorrect Address. Web spiders could be fooled into DoSing by pages full of invalid links.

A True Battle of Evils

[dmehus]

ICANN has made numerous unpopular decisions throughout its corporate life. So has VeriSign. This is truly a battle of two evils. Which one is the lesser evil, in your opinion?

In my own personal view, I do hope ICANN emerges from this lawsuit as the "victor". If VeriSign were to win its request for an injunction against ICANN, and on the broader claim that ICANN "unlawfully transformed itself from a technical coordination body to the de-facto Internet regulator," I feel it would have far-reaching implications for all of us. It would effectively muzzle ICANN and give VeriSign free reign to do as it pleases with the Internet -- at least until a legislative change was made, such as making ICANN into a government regulatory agency similar to the FCC. Mind you, that might be a good thing. It might force the Bush administration's conservative laissez-faire approach to Internet governance to get a dramatic overhaul and become more regulatory. Another plus to ICANN becoming a taxpayer-funded government regulatory body, it could keep its acronym and be enshrined into law as the Internet Commission for Assigned Names and Numbers. Or, it could become the Internet Naming and Numbering Agency -- or INNA.

Nonetheless, this will be a bitter battle.

It also has high stakes for VeriSign. If VeriSign is unsuccessful, it will almost certainly ensure that the dot-net gTLD is redelegated to a new operator later this year.

My take,
Doug

P.S. Copies of the complaint:
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/verisi gn.complaint .p1of2.022604.pdf

and

http://www.politechbot.com/docs/verisign.complai nt .p2of2.022604.pdf

Re::rolleyes:

[Quasar1999]

I agree with your views... However, I would suggest we simply get rid of verisign, ICANN, and every other company that can hold the internet hostage. I don't have a good replacement strategy in mind yet, but there's got to be a solution that doesn't leave a single company holding all the cards. Distributed administration of the internet? Is that possible? I don't know, I'm not a network theorist (or whatever the official title for that would be.)... anyone care to explain why we have a single entity in charge?

Why do we need Verisign?

[teeker]

This may be a dumb question....but why do we need Verisign? I know they control some of the root servers, but why them? Couldn't the internet as a whole (if it could somehow come to an agreement), give those root servers to somebody else? The list of root servers is static. If everybody just changed the list all at once, their servers would suddenly become quiet and this would be a non-issue.

Of course, I realize that doing that would not be so straightforward, but such an effort would send a message...to Verisign and to anybody else that would try this kind of crap. Self-healing network, heal thyself!