Verisign to sue ICANN over Anti-trust

February 26th, 2004
By Nick Wingfield

In a move that could spur changes in how important aspects of the Internet's technical workings are managed, VeriSign Inc. said it plans Thursday to file a broad antitrust lawsuit against the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, the U.S.-government sanctioned group that oversees the address system that helps Internet traffic find its destination.

In the lawsuit, which VeriSign said it would file Thursday afternoon in federal court in Los Angeles, the Mountain View., Calif., company will allege that Icann has overstepped its authority as a technical-coordination group and stifled VeriSign's attempts to introduce new services it says would benefit Internet users.

The lawsuit brings to a head a long-standing antipathy between VeriSign and Icann. Icann, a nonprofit corporation headquartered in Marina del Ray, Calif., was established in 1998 by the U.S. Department of Commerce to help introduce competition in the market for registering "domain names," or Internet addresses, and the company still plays an important role in the technical management of the Internet's domain-name system.

VeriSign has a contract with Icann to operate the registry for Internet addresses ending in the popular ".com" and ".net" suffixes, a master directory of domain names that helps steer all e-mail, Web browsers and other Internet traffic to their proper destinations.

In its complaint, VeriSign alleges that Icann went beyond the scope of its contract with VeriSign in preventing the company from offering a number of new services. Most recently Icann forced VeriSign to suspend a service called SiteFinder that funneled Web users who mistyped Internet addresses in their browsers to a VeriSign search engine. SiteFinder was criticized by many technologists and Icann for disrupting the workings of certain Internet software.

"For us, at the end of the day this is a contract dispute about Icann's broadening ... its jurisdiction to become a de facto regulator of the Internet," said Tom Galvin, VeriSign's vice president of government relations.

The lawsuit comes at a time when international groups are seeking to play a larger role in management of the Internet address system. The United Nations is scheduled to hold a forum at its headquarters in New York next month on Internet governance.