ICANN/Verisign Sued For Monopoly Abuse

Andy_R writes "The BBC is reporting that the World Association of Domain Name Developers (WADND) have filed suit against ICANN and Verisign for alleged violations of antitrust, conspiracy, monopolization and price fixing laws. The suit alleges that the two are entering an unlawful agreement that gives VeriSign a permanent monopoly over the all .com and .net domain name registrations, and the right to raise prices at 7% per annum forever. The text of the lawsuit is available as a .pdf from WADND." ZDNet has the story as well.

Comments

Re:it is possible that...

[AdamWeeden]

I'm fairly sure that the sub-registrars you go through (godaddy.com, regsiter.com, etc.) are just middle men.

Re:court?

[garrett714]

Is there any interantional court? Geneva? US? UN? Japan? we are talking about whole earth...


Closest thing would be the International Court of Justice run by the UN.

Re:And at the end of the day....

[31415926535897]

Makes me wish I went into law rather than computer science.

I strongly considered this right after receiving my computer science degree. I actually have a friend who is going down this road. Nevertheless, I interned in the IT department of a smallish (but hugely successful) law firm one summer in college and befriended many of the lawyers in the office, including one of the founders.

Every single one of them recommended staying out of law if you desire to have any sort of life. It is very difficult to be married and try to practice law (at least private law where you're trying your darndest to acquire clients and win their cases). I think it really depends what you want. These lawyers were all making millions per year (the partners were splitting 8-figure profits every year). They were also working at least 80 hours per week.

I have a job I love right now, and while I'm not making that kind of buck, I get to spend a lot of time with my family (and I just had a baby girl, so I love to be home!). I'm not getting an ulcer or going crazy from sleep deprevation, and that has to be worth something.

Again, it all depends on your goals. But if you want that lifestyle, get into it now, because if you don't do it now you'll probably never have a chance to switch later.

Two groups suing ICANN?

[wayne]

CircleID is reporting that ICANN has been sued over their deal with Verisign by a group called Coalition for ICANN Transparency Inc. These don't, on the surface, appear to be the same group as mentioned in the BBC and ZNET stories.

CFIT appears to be much less of "fuckweasels" to me.

Re:Solution...

[dada21]

The United Nation is not a for-profit organization? Really?

were arrested over bribery involving millions of dollars

in which one U.N. staffer, Alexander Yakovlev, was convicted in a Manhattan federal court this past August

step down from his post Monday amid allegations that he and the governing

Bailey's Compass Sacks Three Execs In UN Scandal

Germany Shocked by Damning Report On UN Scandal

More?

Email from Directi.com CEO Bhavin Turakhia

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi everyone,

I am writing this letter to all of you personally because it is time for all of you to stand up for a cause. Some of you might be aware that ICANN and Verisign recently announced a proposed settlement of their pending litigation (Verisign had sued ICANN a few years ago and that lawsuit is pending). We believe this settlement is unfair, unjust, inappropriate and would be blasphemous to the Internet community and to your Business.

Some Highlights of the settlement

• The settlement agreement allows Verisign to increase the price of .com domain names to every Registrar by 7% every year. Currently Verisign charges all Registrars $6 for every domain name. The new settlement agreement however allows them to increase prices to all of us without any cost justification. They can simply increase the price by 7% EACH year.
• This means they could double the price in 10 years. Naturally any increase in price would mean all Registrars would have to increase their prices to you. This would reduce your sales and reduce your potential to sell other Products.
• In this settlement proposal ICANN is giving Verisign the chance to make more than 2 Billion Dollars extra over the next 10 years. This may by far be the most expensive settlement proposal the world has witnessed.
• This 2 Billion Dollars is coming out of your / your customers pockets.
• The new settlement agreement also doubles the ICANN fees charged to Registrars. Currently Registrars pay 25 cents per domain name to ICANN. The new agreement will make that 50 cents. This again means all Registrars will further increase what they charge all of you for dotCom Domain Names.
• The new settlement agreement has a perpetual presumptive renewal clause. This means that Verisign will permanently hold on to the dotCom Registry. There will never be any competitive bid for it, except in a very remote circumstance. Verisign now gets the right to a perpetual monopoly. This means that they are free to do whatever they want with dotCom, without fear of competition. Prices therefore will never reduce.

The entire settlement documents are posted online at http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/verisign/sett lement-agreements.htm

The part with regards to pricing is in Section 7.3 of http://www.icann.org/tlds/agreements/verisign/com- registry-agreement-22sep05.pdf

What can you do?

This settlement agreement will be signed very soon unless the ICANN Board is convinced otherwise. You all represent the voice of the various Domain Name Consumers worldwide. All of you should send your comments about this settlement and how it will affect your business.

Send your comments to settlement-comments@icann.org

Keep the following points in mind before sending your comments:

• Put in your company name, and specify how long you have been in business, and how you represent the voices of hundreds and thousands of Customers in your specific region.
• You may specify how any increase in the dotCom domain name prices will affect your business.
• Readup existing comments by other people at http://forum.icann.org/lists/settlement-comments/. Your comments can be similar to the ones already posted. More number of comments about the same issue from different people across different countries would clearly show that everyone is concerned about the same issue.

Feel free also to forward this email to your Customers and Resellers and urge them to indivi

Re:Sore losers?

[wayne]

So, having lost the battle over who "owns" the Internet (or at least the DNS system), it seems as though the next step is to challenge the "owner" as a monopoly.

I think you are confused. The two different(?)groups suing ICANN (CFIT and WADND) don't appear to have anything to do with the EU and their complaints about ICANN and the US government control of ICANN. ICANN has made many enemies over the years.

That said, the Verisign agreement may well be related to the complaints by the EU. Part of this agreement between ICANN and Verisign calls for Verisign to support ICANN in the squabble over the US control over ICANN. Remeber, ICANN has made many enemies over the years and has few friends. Buying Verisign off by giving them the .COM zone forever may have been what ICANN felt the needed to do to prevent themselves from losing all control. Also remember that, after sitting unresolved for a long time, this agreement came about right after the EU vs ICANN squabble heated up.

I'm REALLY having a hard deciding who scares me more to have control over the top level domains: ICANN or the UN.

Burn 'em.

[ktulu182]

As an employee of one small .com Registrar I would rather support WADND in this case. ICANN and Verisign are a bunch of greedy lazy bastards. ICANN earns 25 cents per year per every .com/.net domain name (so called ICANN tax - basically for nothing, they only perform Registrar accreditations), and Verisign takes 6 bucks for maintaining .com/.net Registry. But there other ICANN taxes, which are not so widely visible to general public. ICANN charges all .com/.net Registrars $20k a year just for the right to register .com/.net domains (plus 25 cents tax for each domain), last year that annual ICANN tax was 5 times lower (around $4k). So basically small guys on the domain market are now in much more difficult conditions, because profit margins have significantly decreased in last few years, some Registrars have a profit margin of 25 cents per domain name. That is you have to register or renew at least 80,000 domains a year just to pay all ICANN taxes, that is not counting labour costs etc. Basically as a result of ICANN actions domain registration business has been closed for small guys, it is now not possible to enter this business without shitloads of money. It was deliberate action of ICANN, they even planned in their annual budget a descrease of Registrar number from 500 to around 200.

Re:Solution...

[lysergic.acid]

Are you that dense? The whole scandal was about corporations and businesses bribing Saddam Hussein in order to get oil deals from him when the U.N. program restricted Iraq's oil exports to exchanges for humanitarian aid. The corporations and CEO's responsible for the scandal undermined the U.N.'s resolution. The key players who benefited from the scandal were Siemens, Daimler Chrysler, Volvo, atleast one Halliburton firm and more than 2000 other companies. It was a corporate scandal if anything.

"Companies buying oil at cut prices would funnel extra money to Iraq through "surcharges" while those receiving money from Iraq for humanitarian goods and services would return a portion in "kickbacks", the report found." -- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4440804.stm>

You can read more details here as well: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/27792/