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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."

4 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.