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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."

33 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. This seems familiar... by romper · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
    1. Re:This seems familiar... by kmmatthews · · Score: 4, Funny

      That would be like them, to threaten to use a tool that they claim doesn't exist in order to coerce people to pay them. :)

      --
      feh. stuff.
    2. Re:This seems familiar... by XMyth · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yes. What's wrong with that logic?

      -SCO

  2. yes.. because it was... by joeldg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "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.
  3. plagiarizing by avdp · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:plagiarizing by Souffle · · Score: 3, Informative

      This is actually standard practice in Slashdot postings. So, apparently not a no-no to many people. Not saying it's right, only that I see it all the time.

  4. 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 AKAImBatman · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      Maybe the lawyers are catching up, but it has always been a requirement that a judge make a decision based on law. If he makes a decision you don't agree with, then somewhere there's a law that you don't agree with. If he makes a decision that you DO agree with, it's because there is a law somewhere that you DO agree with.

      I wish people would stop demonizing judges, or putting them on pedestals. They don't have much wiggle room for a "good" or "bad" decision. Their function is to interpret the law, even if they don't like what it says. All they can do is mitigate the damages according to what is allowed by law.

      --
      Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
    3. 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?
    4. Re:After a long drought out legal common sense... by urlgrey · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Logic and common sense prevailed here indeed.

      If only this same judge could magically get even five minutes with the patent folks and teach them a thing or two about a thing or two.
      "Ok, folks, there are two new rules for awarding a patent. They are:

      "First, the idea can't have already existed in the outside world before you saw this idea. This means you'll have to do research. I suggest you try Google.

      "Second, the idea has to have merit. This means you'll have to do research. I suggest you ask at least two other people this question: 'Does this idea: [insert idea here] suck?"

      That's it. Meeting adjourned!
      We should be so lucky. :-|

      ----
      --
      Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
    5. 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.
    6. 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
  5. Wait a minute... by response3 · · Score: 5, Funny

    www.goolge.com = www.verisign.com. Huh? Or even worse, www.reallynastygirls.com = www.verisign.com !! Oh the horror!

  6. Would work... by omghi2u · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This would work if a third-party site that had lists of registrars went up...

    But then VeriSign wouldn't make as much money!

    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.

  7. Misspellins by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  8. Coming soon... by lukewarmfusion · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  9. 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....

  10. What? by cr0y · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:What? by rs79 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The National Science Foundation originally funded all registration services for IPs and Domains. They bid it out and NSI won it. At the time the net was largely US academic and R&D and fell within the aegis of the NSF.

      When Stephen Wolff privatied the NSF backbone and uunet, sprint etc had an excuse to exist, Wolff simply overlooked the fact the domain/ip stuff was still in government control.

      The original plans were to create lots of others NSI's. Postel in 96 wanted 300 new TLDS to compete with NSI; tradictionally the net solves problems of monopoly by the creation of additional resources, not regulation, but, the trademark attornies saw ICANN as a convenient stranglehold and combined with the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars big busines have paid for washington lobbyits to exert influence there is no real competion for NSI, jsut additional sales channels. Unless of course you think .coop, .museum and .pro are even remotely viable.

      It's unfortunate that todays decision, while highly regarded, asssits ICANN in it's feature creep; it's scope is supposed to be a narrow technical mandate, and they've prevented NSI from doing what dozens of other tlds have done for years.

      TO find the real motivation behind this, and no it's not NXDOMAIN - follow the money.

      --
      Need Mercedes parts ?
  11. best example of this by Chuck+Bucket · · Score: 3, Interesting

    or the best example provided *because* of this is http://www.whitehouse.org/. Moce, very moce!

    CB

    --
    free ipod and free gmail!
  12. 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.

    1. Re:I miss return codes by Tweezer · · Score: 3, Informative

      You can easily customize such actions in IE. Go to Tools|Internet Options|Advanced Under the Browsing section uncheck the "Show friendly HTTP error messages." Under search from address bar click the "Do Not search from the address bar" button.

      Then you can have your return codes back the way you want.

    2. Re:I miss return codes by Ancil · · Score: 3, Informative

      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?

      Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced -> Search from the Address bar -> "Do not search from the Address bar" -> thank you; drive through

  13. I think I speak for everyone on the planet.... by bani · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...when I say,

    fuck you, verisign

  14. Re:Like it really matters.... by glpierce · · Score: 3, Funny

    "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
  15. As I understand it... by YouHaveSnail · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...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.

    1. Re:As I understand it... by xgamer04 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Yeah yeah ICANN was all like "Yo Veri, take care of my peeps fo a while" and Veri was like "OK holmes", but then veri was like "dag yo, i gots mad power" and ICANN came back and was all up in his face like "OH NO YOU DI-ENT!"

      --
      When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
  16. A good thing indeed.. by tirnacopu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  17. An actual benefit to Sitefinder by argent · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  18. 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.

  19. Does ICANN still get cut of the reg fee? by Em+Ellel · · Score: 4, Funny

    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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