ICANN general counsel John Jeffrey told ComputerWire that the judge dismissed the first of seven claims in VeriSign’s complaint, which was filed in February. VeriSign has until June 7 to rewrite and re-file the complaint, he said.
The suit centers around services such as Site Finder, which ICANN told VeriSign to turn off following public outcry last fall, and Waiting List Service, which ICANN has approved but only after long delays.
VeriSign reckons ICANN is acting outside of its US government mandate by preventing these services coming to market in a timely manner or at all. ICANN often says it is acting in the best interest of the stability of the internet.
The claim that was dismissed alleged ICANN broke the Sherman Act, the Federal antitrust law. VeriSign alleged conspiratorial actions designed to prevent VeriSign bringing new domain name registry services to market.
Because that claim was the only allegation of Federal law being broken, the Federal judge hearing the case did not rule on the other claims of the suit, according to Jeffrey. The ruling itself was not available by press time yesterday.
The VeriSign complaint also alleges, among other things, that ICANN acts in violation of the contract between the two under which VeriSign runs the .com and net domain name registries, which are the two most-used internet domains.
This contract provides that ICANN must approve registry services VeriSign plans to launch. The definition of registry services is under dispute. VeriSign says systems such as Site Finder are not registry services within the contract.
Site Finder, under which VeriSign intercepted misspelled .com lookups and sent browsers to its own pages, caused controversy last September, when it was turned on with no consultation with internet stakeholders.
