VeriSign - who received a lot of criticism when it sprung the move on the Internet community earlier this week - has refused to change its stance, saying it will help companies with technical issues but continue to redirect surfers to its site.
However, the company, with a government-granted monopoly as the master database administrator for .com and .net, may be forced to change its mind, with media reporting a lawsuit has been filed in the US federal court alleging antitrust violations, unfair competition and violations of the Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.
According to the lawsuit, VeriSign is using its monopolistic position to unfair advantage, not only in making money off the redirected services (through advertising) but by improperly interfering with competing services, such as Netster's SmartBrowse and services by ISPs, which redirect a mistyped URL to a page suggesting search options similar to the original request. Internet Explorer comes with a built in program to display a ninemsn Search page for an incorrect URL, but this now redirects to VeriSign's pages when the URL ends in a dot-com or dot-net.
