The company filed an amended lawsuit in California this week, arguing that several experts recruited by ICANN to do a technical analysis of Site Finder were in fact competitors, who conspired to have ICANN tell VeriSign to turn off Site Finder for competitive reasons.
The lawsuit, which alleges violations of contract and antitrust law, seeks to clear the murky water covering what kinds of powers ICANN has over VeriSign’s domain name registry business. VeriSign calls ICANN its de facto regulator.
The suit names ICANN’s co-conspirators as Afilias Ltd, which runs .info, domain registrar Alice’s Registry, Paul Vixie and Suzanne Woolf of Internet Systems Consortium Inc, and Steve Crocker, one of the internet’s original architects.
The Site Finder coconspirators have combined with other VeriSign competitors to prevent the offering of Site Finder on the grounds that Site Finder would make VeriSign a more effective competitor and stimulate and enhance competition, the complaint reads.
Site Finder was a service whereby VeriSign would intercept misspelled or non-existent URLs in .com and .net and present a page filled with suggested alternatives and keyword-based advertising instead of an error message.
The service was launched last September and immediately prompted an outcry from seasoned internet users. It lasted two weeks and made VeriSign about a half a million dollars before the company reluctantly pulled the plug at ICANN’s sternly-worded instruction.
ICANN’s order to turn Site Finder off was based on its interpretation of the service as a registry service, which require approval from ICANN before launch, according to its contracts with VeriSign that allow the company to run .com and .net.
VeriSign says Site Finder is not a registry service as defined by the vaguely-worded contracts, and says even when it is trying to launch services that can be categorized that way, ICANN drags its feet and costs VeriSign money before approving them.
ICANN argues that Site Finder caused security and stability issues on the internet. Networking professionals argue that predictable error messages are an important part of the domain name system. However, scant evidence of major disruptions has been reported.
In the newly revised complaint, VeriSign argues that ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SECSAC), which recommended Site Finder be removed, was stuffed with competitors, and did not base its decision on the technical facts.
The company points to a draft version of SECSAC’s technical report, which contains the conclusion that Site Finder should be turned off, but in place of factual information has the text: This is where we need to include the factual information to support the opinions and recommendations that follow. Paul Vixie and Suzanne, among others, please dump stuff into this section.
Vixie and Woolf work for ISC, which runs a domain name root server and develops the BIND software that runs much of the internet’s DNS. During Site Finder’s existence, Vixie wrote an optional patch that would disable Site Finder in BIND.
Alice’s Registry, also named as a conspirator, is a small domain registrar with less than 3,000 names under management. VeriSign says the firm could be a competitor for registry contracts in future. Afilias, also named, is one of VeriSign’s closest competitors.
The first complaint was dismissed after the court found that in order to sufficiently plead a conspiracy, VeriSign must allege that ICANN’s decision-making process was controlled or greatly influenced by economic competitors who have agreed to injure VeriSign.
ICANN’s SECSAC is due to shortly release a final report into Site Finder, seven months late. Its recommendations are not yet know. VeriSign is widely believed to be readying Site Finder to be reactivated, but has not given a date.
