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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.
.... The only people who will win are they lawyers. Makes me wish I went into law rather than computer science.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
The way I see it, there should only be one entity in charge of assigning of names for the internet. With millions of people on the internet, having multiple organizations in charge of domains and such would make the internet so much less efficient.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
How can it possibly cost more every year to register a domain name? Everything involved except labour continually becomes cheaper - bandwidth, processing power, storage, everything! The process is basically automated anyway, so how can a steady increase in the cost of registering a domain be justified?
The price is already too high, in my opinion - companies like verisign (and other domain name registers) are making money by charging for something that is essentially free to create. For-profit companies should be kept out of domain registration - isn't that part of the point of ICANN in the first place?
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.
Hmm. Being a monopoly is not a crime. It only becomes so when abuse of monopoly power can be demonstrated. This does not look like it (yet), as there is a big difference between what you are contractually allowed to do, and what you actually end up doing.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
They probably wouldn't. I know saying anything in a sarcastic matter-of-factly tone makes you sound witty, but there's not much merit or logical basis for assuming that the U.N. would make the same kind of abuses. The U.N. is not a for-profit organization, and U.N. commitee members cannot profit from such unethical practices. They don't have shareholders whom they are obligated to turn a profit for. As such, it makes them much more suitable for running a global communication infrastructure that's just as important to our global society as other shared public infrastructures such as roads and sewage systems. So if anything, these abuses by ICANN should make us reconsider the legitimacy of their monopolistic control.