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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."
VeriSign responded by issuing a press release stating that the federal court system doesn't really exist, and that all other domain registrars must purchase a license from VeriSign to continue to sell domain names or face litigation.
Right is wrong when left is right.
"a service to the community"
Those guys actually tried to pull that...
I wonder how much stake overture had in that.. No journalist has ever approached them to find out their role in that story.
a service indeed..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
emtboy9's writeup is not much of a writeup. It's word for word the first 3 paragraph of the article without giving CNet credit for it. That's kind of a no-no to me.
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."
www.goolge.com = www.verisign.com. Huh? Or even worse, www.reallynastygirls.com = www.verisign.com !! Oh the horror!
This would work if a third-party site that had lists of registrars went up...
But then VeriSign wouldn't make as much money!
I for one, wish that all misspellings in URLs would just automatically go to a porn, casino or other site that tries to hijack your home page and/or install spyware. It would save millions of dollars to the poor companies who provide these services.
Sorry! Your request for "www.icann.org" was not successful. The domain may not exist or may be a bunch of jerks that won't let us get away with world dominations.
Please visit <a href="http://www.verisign.com/">this super awesome site</a> to find what you're looking for.
...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....
Maybe someone can fill me in, I have been following this, but I still don't get how one company can control all the .com and .net domains....Isn't that illegal?
ItWasFree.com - Take the mystery
If you get a domain wrong, the god damn browser should take you to google or whatever search engine you specified under some settings within your browser.
Its not like it would be that hard to do.
or the best example provided *because* of this is http://www.whitehouse.org/. Moce, very moce!
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
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.
...when I say,
fuck you, verisign
"Had they won this case, SCO would have claimed ownership of Verizon and took it down anyways."
I see - once they owned Verizon, they could cut off Verisign's phone service and then use it as leverage to get them to turn it down. Brilliant.
G
...Verisign essentially won a contract to maintain a couple of the most important top level domains for ICANN (on behalf of the rest of us). Verisign took that essentially as a grant of monopoly power over all unassigned domains in those TLD's, and thinks that it therefore has the right to point all requests for such unassigned domains to its own site.
ICANN then said to Verisign: "Oh no you don't. Your contract is just to maintain a couple of databases. You don't suddenly own the net." And so, predictably, Verisign went to court to plead it's so-called case. Just as predictably, they lost.
It's nice when things work out like they should.
One cool application of this good thing I stumbled upon was one of the so many trojans (don't remember the exact flavour, CWSShredder erased it) which added its own IP address in the hosts file for sitefinder.verisign.com - the result? It took the user several days to find out how the heck the trojan kept showing back, since he only visited 2 (two) sites with IE because of the usual incompatibilities. A small typo, a mhtml:// exploit and voila! The fellow actually thought that the site where he did some e-commerce stuff was hacking his machine.. talk about losing a customer and not know what hit you.
At least that's what I remember it being called.
When private corporation accounted for over half of what was and content on the Internet.
I think it was 1997 or 1998.
Sniff.
Verisign caused a lot more damage than just to email. Any application that needs to determine the validity of a domain name broke. The solution, which was already being implemented in various places when Sitefinder went down, was to use a caching or forwarding nameserver locally and special-case the address of Sitefinder... make it look just like "no such domain" to any applications. Then if you're using a routing firewall you program it to NAT any other servers DNS requests to the root to go to one of your own DNS servers, and Sitefinder vanishes.
This would have indirectly lead to a benefit, because it would make it that much easier to switch to an alternate root by changing your own configuration in one place, or otherwise ignore other "cunning schemes" Verisign might come up with.
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.
It's a funny quote from a movie not intended to be offensive [or even a genuine reference to sexuality at any level]. Basically I'm saying that working for them wasn't a pleasant experience, and I found many of their business practices to be less than what I would call ethical. Sorry for any confusion...
[This sig left intentionally blank.]
I've always wondered by a browser couldn't chase the dns to provide a more meaningfull diagnostic. For example:
"No such domain exists" - the TLD servers returned NXDOMAIN
"The domain exists but the authoritative servers are unreachable" - domain has been properly delegated by the parent zone but the nameservers are off the air
"The domain is not set up properly" - the domain has been properly delegated and the authoritative nameservers answer with proper NS records but no A record can be found.
And so on and so forth. Seeing the same "No DNS" since Marc Andresson released the first copy of Netscape on usenet is pretty lame.
Need Mercedes parts ?
If so, it seems they should simply send Verisign a bill for infinate number of domains. (Is there a limit on how long a domain name can be?)
I can just picture the look on the face of the Verisign employee opening a bill with a big infinity sign in the amount column.
-Em
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