VeriSign sues ICANN to restore Site Finder - News - Business

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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VeriSign sues ICANN to restore Site Finder

By Declan McCullagh, Special to ZDNet
February 27, 2004
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/VeriSign-sues-ICANN-to-restore-Site-Finder/0,139023166,139116335,00.htm

VeriSign has filed a lawsuit claiming that the nonprofit organisation responsible for overseeing domain names and online addresses has overstepped its authority and blocked innovations that could benefit Internet users.

The suit, filed Thursday in the central district of California, said the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) unlawfully transformed itself over the last six years from a modest technical coordinating body into the "de facto regulator of the domain name system."

VeriSign, based in Mountain View, California, has sparred with ICANN over a number of issues, including whether a feature called Site Finder, which redirected many .com and .net false domains to a VeriSign site, was a threat to the Internet's security and stability.

The lawsuit, filed just days before next week's ICANN meetings in Rome, asks for a court order that would permit VeriSign to resume the Site Finder service.

"We have still to receive any information saying that Site Finder was going to be a threat to the stability or security of the Internet," said Tom Galvin, VeriSign's vice president for government relations. Galvin said the two organisations had been butting heads for years, and VeriSign eventually "realised our best option was to try to get some sort of clarity in the legal sense."

The lawsuit accuses ICANN of violating federal antitrust laws and asks the court to grant an injunction preventing it from doing anything to "interfere with" the reinstatement of Site Finder. It also asks for damages and a requirement that VeriSign be treated in a "fair, reasonable and equitable fashion" from now on.

ICANN General Counsel John Jeffrey could not immediately be reached for comment.

Under its contract with ICANN, VeriSign operates the master database of all .com and .net domains, and collects a few dollars a year for each domain name from the scores of ICANN-accredited registrars who sell domain names to the public.