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Verisign's Lawsuit Against ICANN Dismissed
emtboy9 writes "Internet domain name registry VeriSign just can't seem to convince anyone that redirecting misspelled Web addresses to its own site is a good thing. A federal district court judge on Thursday threw out VeriSign's legal arguments that ICANN's ban on this tactic amounted to a violation of U.S. antitrust law. VeriSign, which runs the master database for .com and .net addresses, had argued that its competitors had succeeded in stymying VeriSign's plans for its Site Finder service by providing advice to the board of directors of ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers."
Maybe the knowledge of the judges, lawyers and whatnot is finally catching up with the times, and they are displaying some comprehension of the high tech fields on which they're ruling.
One can only hope this trend of understanding continues.
-- "A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg."
Yah, there's a certain irony in Verisign suing someone through the antitrust laws. Allowing Verisign to purchase Network Solutions, and in fact letting Network Solutions run as a for-profit company in the first place, were some of the stupidest decisions in the history of the Internet.
...Given the sheer number of spurious lawsuits I've been seeing on here, this comes as a great relief to me that one large one is being thrown out of court. Thank you, US justice system!
Boy, I don't get to say that too often....
I find it more and more difficult to tell whether a site of pages exists anymore with moves like this. It used to be if a page wasn't there I'd get a nice 404 or if the site didn't exist I'd get a 502 etc. I use firefox at home, but at work we use I.E and if I type in a URL that doesn't work I get taken to msn search page, does that mean the server is down, doesn't exist or what? If I look for a page that doesn't seem to be there, instead of a 404 I get told page unavailable unless the site has their own custom not found page, does this mean it doesn't exist or its not available? Its the dumbing down of the Internet.
Typical! It's a troll just because the OP swore. Get real, mods, Verisign very nearly removed one of our weapons against spam, the non-existent domain rule. Now, does that not seem to be a very good reason for making the OP's post our slogan of the day, or does the Verisign DNS hijack have some obscure benefit that I didn't see?
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
I'd make a confident guess that the "basis" for this suit is a Supreme Court opinion from the 80s ("Hydrolevel") saying basically that standards-setting organizations can't allow themselves to become a tool for conspiratorial members who have an anti-competitive agenda.
VeriSign tried to make a case that ICANN's decision reflected a bias in the structure of the organization. That's really a question about the ICANN bureaucracy and the objectivity of the decision-making process. Obviously the judge approved of ICANN's actions. But I don't think that approval has anything to do with the actual merits of the decision, but rather the procedure used to reach it.
One other possible answer is "you can't rely on NXDMAIN"; you couldn't before NSI did this of course as at the time 13 other TLDS were dong it from as far back as 3 years prior.
Yes, yes, and there's SLDs and 3LDs that had used wildcard A records long before that. I've got an SLD that does it, for that matter.
But... there's a big difference between a TLD that's been handed off lock stock and NS records to a vanity domain registrar, that's run as a private company, that might as well be a SLD as far as its relevance to the functioning of the domain name system is concerned, and a TLD like com, org, or a national TLD that's actually managed as a national TLD.
And on top of that, DNS is exactly the wrong place to put the service you're talking about. The only service that was provided was for HTTP... for web browsers. There's maybe a couple of other protocols that might have benefited from it, but that's about all, and even for things like "you typoed your email address" it's a lot harder to figure out a good way to provide the service... and of course there's no likelihood that Verisign would ever do it.
No, there's basically two places to put a service like this. In the web browser, and in a web proxy. They're the only places that can possibly know that a request was for a web page instead of something else.
And Microsoft has put exactly this service in Internet Explorer. They do a crummy job of it: they don't distinguish usefully between "this host ain't here" and "this web page ain't here", and the information they provide is misleading, but they *do* have the ability to provide the same kind of service in a way that doesn't cause problems for other protocols.
Putting it in the browser, or in a proxy (heck, you could get your proxy to redirect to Sitefinder or to any other service that does a better job... like Google, for example), limits it to requests where it makes sense, and gives people an incentive to use YOUR browser instead of someone else's. You know, I haven't looked, but I would be completely unsurprised to find there's already a Firefox extension that procides the same functionality... or better.
This isn't Verisign's job, and Verisign has neither the abilityto do it right nor the power to decide to do it in the first place, and this decision simply declines to give Verisign a power it was never supposed to have.