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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.

19 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Who regulates them? by Milo+of+Kroton · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Every industry has some form of governmental regulation (except for the drug trade). Pharmaceutical companies have the FDA, why can't we create an Internet Oversight Beauro?

    --
    Read journal when you are not understand
    1. Re:Who regulates them? by Guildencrantz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The problem for this is that the question comes down to whos government? The internet is an entity that extends well beyond typical political borders. ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers) is supposed to be an international organization to take care of the peculiarities of how addresses will be assigned within this lawless realm.

      ~~Guildencrantz

      --

      Penguin Trivia #46: Animals who are not penguins can only wish they were. -- Chicago Reader 10/15/82
    2. Re:Who regulates them? by deadlinegrunt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If they're not doing their job, can't someone oversee them?

      I see somebody here is a staunch supporter of big business and big government with that attitude.

      I think the ideal thing to do is replace "them" with something that actually works, not oversee "them". Just a thought.

      --
      BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
    3. Re:Who regulates them? by kunudo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I, being european, would be pissed about that. Especially after stuff like this. I wouldn't want an extension of the US. govt to have even more power over the web than it has today. I suppose we could just roll our own web, I mean, the rest of the world, but that would be kinda dumb...

    4. Re:Who regulates them? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Pharmaceutical companies are in the drug trade. It's a legal drug trade, but a drug trade nonetheless.

    5. Re:Who regulates them? by SoSueMe · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Makes me think of this:
      A Japanese company and an American company decided to have a canoe race on the Missouri River. Both teams practiced long and hard to reach their peak performance before the race.

      On the big day the Japanese won by a mile. Afterward, the American team became very discouraged and morally depressed. The American management decided the reason for the crushing defeat had to be found. A Management Team made up of senior management was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate action. Their conclusion was the Japanese had 8 people rowing and 1 person steering, while the American team had 8 people steering and one person rowing.

      So American management hired a consulting company and paid them an incredible amount of money. They advised that too many people were steering the boat, while not enough people were rowing. To prevent losing to the Japanese again next year, the rowing team's management structure was totally reorganized to 4 steering supervisors, 3 area steering superintendents and 1 assistant superintendent steering manager. They also implemented a new performance system that would give the 1 person rowing the boat greater incentive to work harder. It was called the Rowing Team Quality First Program, with meetings, dinners and free pens for the rower. We must give the rower the empowerment and enrichments through this quality program.

      The next year the Japanese won by two miles. Humiliated, the American management laid off the rower for poor performance, halted development of a new canoe, sold the paddles, and canceled all capital investments for new equipment. Then they distributed the money saved as bonuses to the senior executives.
  2. Oh the irony by JosKarith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Verisign, who jealously guard their monopoly on domains, suing ICANN for "Restraining competition"
    Christ, the guy who cleared that lawsuit must have the hugest set of brass balls in existence

    --
    'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
    1. Re:Oh the irony by perlchild · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You're explaining by courage what can best be explained by terminal cluelessness about the technical issues here.

      You're giving away undeserved karma.

  3. What's the difference... by kai5263499 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    between Verisign redirecting people at the DNS level and Microsfot redirecting people at the Browser level with MSIE?

    Either way you are getting advertizements or tainted search results, and it's annoying either way.

    I guess since it's DNS level, no one can "opt out" by choosing another browser, but the average user dosen't know how to do that either...

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    -Wes
    1. Re:What's the difference... by Short+Circuit · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's only true for HTTP traffic. Generating false domain names broke a lot of other services. Like checking to see if a domain existed before accepting an email address as "From" that domain.

      --
      tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
    2. Re:What's the difference... by damgx · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The internet is more then just http (webbrowsing).

      This mess up ftp, smtp nntp and other protocols as well.

      Also why should Verisign have the right to steal page view from Microsoft? (or another browser og website).

      --
      I only read slash. for the articles...
    3. Re:What's the difference... by therblig · · Score: 5, Insightful
      The difference is that people don't have to choose MSIE to be their browser. I can surf the web with Firefox, but I cannot choose whether I interact with Verisign. That's a monopoly I cannot get around.

      As others have also already mentioned, it messes up far more than just web traffic. It has wreaked havoc with many anti-spam solutions. Of course, in Verisign's case (remember their annoying pop-ups), they and the spammers may be more birds of a feather than they care to admit.

      --

      I struggled for days and days and all I got was this lousy sig.

    4. Re:What's the difference... by Mr_Silver · · Score: 4, Insightful
      between Verisign redirecting people at the DNS level and Microsfot redirecting people at the Browser level with MSIE?

      The higher up the level you do it, the more people you affect and the more difficult it is to get it removed if you don't want it.

      If MS do it, you can either disable it in the browser (if there is an option) or use a different browser. It only affects you.

      If Versign do it, you have no choice in the matter.

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      Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
    5. Re:What's the difference... by Tokerat · · Score: 2, Insightful


      DNS is NOT a web-based service. We use it when we use the web to resolve hostnames to IP addresses because the IP addresses are nessesary to communicate over the network. Typing in an HTTP URL will generate a hit to a DNS server, sure, but so will using an FTP client, and so will using Outlook with an IMAP server, etc.

      Under SiteFinder, instead of getting a "DNS Not Found" error response to the DNS request, you get a re-direct response to the SiteFinder page. Therefore, as far as your FTP client knows, the bad hostname it's looking for actually exists (because VeriSign's DNS told it so), and it tries in vain to connect to the SiteFinder servers, which aren't running an FTP, or an IMAP/POP server, or anything besides an HTTP server.

      This effectively breaks the Internet as anything that isn't a web browser which requests a bad hostname will not generate a proper error response and basically hang out trying to connect to SiteFinder, indefinitely in some cases. You'd be suprised how much traffic on the Internet comes from programs besides web browsers.

      --
      CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
  4. Re:Vague by PMuse · · Score: 2, Insightful

    WTF is wrong with "awfully vague?" It seems to work for . . . bogus legislation.

    Judges are less than fond of "vague". Some variant of "start making sense or get out" is heard fairly often.

    Legislators OTOH find "vague" to be highly useful in trying to please more of the peopl^H^H^H^H^H contributors more of the time.

    --
    "We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
  5. Re:US Dept. of Commerce by karl.auerbach · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The US Dept of Commerce has never articulated any clear source of authority for its role in these internet matters.

    Under the US system, agencies like the DoC don't have any "native" powers but rather obtain them only by explicit delegations by statutes and by executive orders (that themselves often need to go back to statutes or the native Article II powers.)

    The General Accounting Office (a branch of the US Congress) investigated the DoC's powers *twice* and found them wanting. And there have been some significant legal articles also making this point.

    In other words, ICANN is on very shakey ground if it tries to claim that its power derives from the US Dept of Commerce.

    The DoC's role over Verisign comes from a Cooperative Agreement that was to have expired six years ago but which has been extended and amendended and extended and amended at least 25 times. It is now so warped that between ICANN and the DoC, Verisign has a what amounts to a perpetual lock on .com (thanks to the attorney who formed ICANN and who has perhaps reaped more personal financial gain out of this entire mess than any other individual.) Under the ICANN contracts (which the DoC buys into) Verisign's lock is nearly unbreakable unless Verisign does somethign criminal or equally bad.

  6. Re:Maybe ICANN should execute their powers... by mabu · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's also worth mentioning that NSI/Internic changed the domain prices and stole millions of dollars from the community and had the courts strike down their fee as an illegal tax. Did they ever return any of the money they collected back to the proper people? Not that I know.

  7. Re:Verisign might be able to get away with it. by urulokion · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Verisign doesn't manage .com addresses. That is the job of the various Registrars, e.g. Network Solutions, Register.com, Go Daddy, etc. Verisign's responsibility is managing the .com Registry. And they manage the .com TLD name servers.

    The .com Registry is the central database the holds all of the .com domains registered via the various Registrars. Verisign is the caretaker of the database. IIRC, they get $6US per year per domain. (A nice, and almost guaranteed, stream of annual revenue.)

    Now let's see who where else can I go to get the .com database managed? Uhm... I can't go anywhere else. Verisign doesn't have any competitors. That sounds like a monopoly to me.

    Now what was the SiteFinder fuss all about? Verisign added wildcard DNS records to it's .com Registry to redirect traffic to it's SiteFinder web site. They were using their monopoly position as the .com Registry to be competitive in Internet Web Search market.

    (Note: I'm not against Verisign trying to build their SiteFinder server. Now power to them. What I and others object to is how Verisign chose to implent their service (the wildcard records in the TLD name server). They need to choose another method to implement SiteFinder.)

    That scenario sound familiar? Well it sound. Microsoft was taken to task recently by the US Department of Justice over similar actions. Abusing a monopoly position in one area to leverage it's position in market. It's called anti-trust. And Verisign is suing ICANN for being anti-competitive?

  8. Re:US Dept. of Commerce by keithmoore · · Score: 2, Insightful

    In other words, ICANN is on very shakey ground if it tries to claim that its power derives from the US Dept of Commerce.

    In other words, the US government is on very shaky ground if it tries to claim that it has power over the international Internet. Note that the international community has at least tentatively been supportive of ICANN - because they realize that as bad as ICANN is, it's probably better than either having multiple roots (even assuming they all get along, which is unlikely) or having the US government try to run things directly (which could easily result in multiple roots).

    Verisign's purported ownership of .COM and .NET is on even shakier ground than the USG's purported ownership of DNS.