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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.
www.goolge.com = www.verisign.com. Huh? Or even worse, www.reallynastygirls.com = www.verisign.com !! Oh the horror!
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.
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.
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.
One can only hope this trend of understanding continues.
and extends to the patent office.
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.
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.