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A Snag For Verisign's Suit Against ICANN

Posted by timothy on from the they-cann't dept.

Dinglenuts writes "Looks like Verisign just received a setback in their lawsuit against ICANN. Verisign sued ICANN for making them take down Sitefinder, but the judge said that their case was 'awfully vague.' The extensive mischief caused by Verisign's new attempts at 'service' have been well documented on Slashdot." Reader Mz6 points out the same AP story as carried by USA Today.

6 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. US Dept. of Commerce by gorzek · · Score: 5, Informative

    The US Department of Commerce specifically regulates what VeriSign can and can't do. For instance, they approve all new TLDs. Not sure how far their authority goes, but it seems to be pretty extensive.

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    1. Re:US Dept. of Commerce by gclef · · Score: 4, Informative

      Well, sort of. The DoC has assigned this task to ICANN. The DoC does not regulate VeriSign directly....ICANN does, under the authority delegated to it by the DoC.

  2. Re:What's the difference... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
    I guess since it's DNS level, no one can "opt out" by choosing another browser,

    You can "opt-out" by simply selecting "never search from address bar" in options. Now if they'd just quit trying to reset my home page to msn.com with every security update...

  3. Re:Verisign might be able to get away with it. by Guildencrantz · · Score: 2, Informative

    Uh, hate to point it out to you, but... .cc is managed by VeriSign. So you just said that they might be able to get away with doing something because they already are doing it.

    ~~Guildencrantz

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  4. A good document describing DNS and identities by hardaker · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Internet Architecture Board has recently written a document (draft-iab-identities) which covers how DNS names are used as identities and why doing things like what verisign was trying to do is a bad thing. They don't outright specify this particular battle, but talk about it in a more generic sense.

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  5. Reasons why this is a bad thing by mabu · · Score: 4, Informative

    1. Unused domain space is just that: unused, and un-owned by anyone. It's unethical to take over IP space that is un-allocated.

    2. Verisign is providing a service that is very specific; they should not be allowed to change the terms of the services they provide without having to put the whole TLD system back up for bid. Since they could use this to profit, all other root servers and other companies who want to compete for this should have a chance. This is the same situation NSI/Verisign found themselves in in the 1990s when they started (illegally) charging for domain registration. The company has a history of "changing the rules" and exploiting others.

    3. Redirecting unused IP space is a huge logistical problem for other systems online; it interferes with all services including ftp and mail - not just the web.

    4. It's a big security problem. Who knows where mail for misspelled domain names ends up going?

    5. The Internet is an International medium. We don't need another arrogant move on the part of US corporate America to further piss off the rest of the world and show that the Americans are hypocritics interested in exploiting resouces they don't have a right to.

    6. If Verisign re-implements their unethical scheme, thousands of systems will modify their DNS to work around it. This could potentially undermine the design of the network to be able to effeciently route around problems and possibly spawn rogue root servers that would be embraced by the ISP community at the expense of the network's flexibility.