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Verisign's Lawsuit Against ICANN Dismissed

Posted by michael on from the too-bad-so-sad dept.

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."

9 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. After a long drought out legal common sense... by tao_of_biology · · Score: 4, Insightful
    it seems like the courts are getting things right lately (see also: SCO). It's a long time comin'.

    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."

    1. Re:After a long drought out legal common sense... by Nos. · · Score: 5, Insightful

      One can only hope this trend of understanding continues.
      and extends to the patent office.

    2. Re:After a long drought out legal common sense... by Shadow+Wrought · · Score: 4, Insightful
      How right you are. I watched a Judge return a verdict of "not guilty" because the law did not support the prosecutions case. She went on, however, to verbally tongue-lash the defendant for doing something that, while not "illegal," was certainly amoral and of questionable ethics ('twas a white-collar case).

      Judges in the the US are bound not only by the statutes, but by the interpretations of those statutes by higher courts. SCO, to choose a random example, is having their head handed to them because they have neither law nor fact on their side. IBM has both and they know how to use it.

      --
      If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
    3. Re:After a long drought out legal common sense... by Cali+Thalen · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Judges make decisions based on their OPINIONS of th laws as they understand them, if they bother to know or research the laws in teh first place (which I assume most do, though not all).

      Assuming that the laws they're basing their decisions on in the first place are just, that's a decent system. If the original laws are crap, then you get new crap laws based on the old ones (until someone finds the lot unconstitutional and throws them out).

      Judges are human, just like the rest of us. They have good and bad days, they come in varying degrees of intelligence, and varying degrees of ignorance. And they aren't cookie-cutters when it comes to their decisions...their understanding and experience can easily affect their judgements.

      --
      Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
    4. Re:After a long drought out legal common sense... by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, a judge is giving his opinion. However, he has to justify that opinion in his findings, or an appeals court will throw it out. Thus his ruling must be based on LAW.

      No, judges are not cookie cutters. It's very difficult for them to know all laws in the area of which they make judgments. That's why we have lawyers. If a lawyer can't correctly argue the case, then the judge may make a decision that could later be overturned. But to say that judges are understanding technology better is a bit silly. It's the lawyers who have to make their case and argue the law in their favor. The judges decision is constrained to that which is on the books, and that which was presented in court.

      --
      Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
  2. Re:Would work... by eln · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. I know it will be modded redundant, but... by wolfemi1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...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....

  4. I miss return codes by Dekks · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. This was decided on the law, not the technology by dfl · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I don't think this case had much to do with the underlying technology, or even the benevolence / malevolence of the parties.

    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.