VeriSign Takes ICANN to State Court
243548
VeriSign Inc. is continuing its legal fight against the main overseer of the Internet&#39;s domain-name system, despite the dismissal last week of its federal lawsuit against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
28181
With management responsibilities of the .net domain soon to be up for grabs, several groups are positioning themselves to snatch the domain from its current steward, VeriSign Inc.
445712
When contact info for Republican delegates got posted on the web, the Department of Justice subpoenaed an ISP, but now seems to be backing off. Ann Harrison reports from New York.
435812
Vaya con dios, internet ICANN 2007 Los Angeles The ICANN Los Angeles 2007 meeting begins Monday, and it is Vint Cerf's swan song as chairman of the ICANN board of directors. We couldn't pass up the opportunity to talk to the "father of the internet" about the future of the internet and of ICANN itself.â¦
321918
(InfoWorld) - Domain name registrar GoDaddy.com will take over more than 850,000 domain names from RegisterFly, a company involved in a dispute regarding its rights to register names. GoDaddy.com will notify RegisterFly customers of the move and automatically switch their domains. RegisterFly customers that don't hear from GoDaddy.com can contact GoDaddy.com for support. Afilias and VeriSign, two registries that have the most RegisterFly names, have waived fees for transferring the names, the organization that oversees the Internet's address system, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), said. The announcement begins to remedy a year-long dispute during which some RegisterFly customers were unable to renew their domain names. The problems began with a disagreement between the two RegisterFly owners that resulted in lawsuits and led to poor service to customers, according to ICANN, which has received high volumes of complaints from RegisterFly customers. Throughout the dispute, a "significant" number of registrants found that their domain names expired. Many also were unable to move their domain names to another registrar, ICANN said. ICANN intervened last year, trying to work with RegisterFly to remedy the situation, but failed to convince the company to improve its service. Ultimately, ICANN began proceedings to remove RegisterFly's registrar accreditation, but that process required court action, further prolonging the poor service for customers. Two weeks ago, ICANN issued a formal notice to RegisterFly terminating its registrar accreditation as of May 31. On Friday, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ordered RegisterFly to post on its site a notice regarding the termination of its accreditation within 48 hours. Such a notice does not appear to be posted on the site as of Tuesday, and the site continues to advertise domain registration.
77635
(InfoWorld) - A VeriSign Inc. official defended its contract to operate the .com domain Monday, after Network Solutions accused the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of not requiring adequate security safeguards in its registry agreements. Network Solutions, a domain-name registrar, released a report last week saying ICANN has "failed" to address security in its latest proposals for the .com, .biz, .info and .org top-level domains. Network Solutions officials also criticized a provision in the proposed contract renewal for the .com domain that would allow VeriSign to raise prices by 7 percent in four of the contract's six years. The current .com contract expires in late 2007. VeriSign shouldn't get near-automatic renewals of the .com contract without more security requirements, said Jonathan Nevett, Network Solutions' vice president and chief policy counsel. "We're facing a contract that provides for ... permanent monopoly, for fee increases without justification and now without adequate security protections," he said. "It's mind-boggling that the contract has gotten this far." But Ken Silva, VeriSign's chief security officer, said some price increases will be necessary to keep the .com domain secure. The contract to operate the .com domain allows ICANN to change the agreement through consensus of its two security committees, and ICANN can cancel the contract if it believes VeriSign hasn't performed adequately, Silva said. VeriSign has warded off several massive attacks on the .com domain, including attacks using more than 30,000 bot-net computers in January, Silva said. Meanwhile, the .com domain has been available 100 percent of the time for the last seven years, he said. Internet attacks continue to evolve and become larger, and it's difficult to set a security road map that stays relevant for any length of time, Silva said. He praised the proposed .com contract renewal for its pricing "flexibility." "The technology we're talking about to keep up with this kind of load is not something you just buy off the shelf," Silva said. "Let's not lose site of the fact that security continues to be the biggest threat to the growth of the Internet. Supporting that security and stability is going to involve a lot of technology, a lot of talent and a lot of equipment." The two companies held briefings about the proposed .com contract as a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee has scheduled a hearing Wednesday on ICANN's future. Besides the top-level domain agreements, the subcommittee is likely to focus on the renewal of the memorandum of understanding between the U.S. Department of Commerce and ICANN, allowing the nonprofit organization to oversee the Internetâs technical infrastructure. A year ago, countries including China and Brazil proposed a new model for Internet governance, with an international body taking responsibility from the U.S. and ICANN. The U.S. government and many U.S. companies oppose such a move. Network Solutions focused on the top-level domain agreements with its report, "DNS -- A System in Crisis." Among its criticisms: the domain agreements do not allow ICANN to audit security practices of domain operators. "This is the backbone of the Internet," said report author Jerry Archer. "Without this, there are no signposts."
343600
The U.S. government is loosening its grip on the domain name system and is edging closer to giving ICANN -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- a greater measure of autonomy in making decisions about the future of the Internet.
762483
VeriSign Inc. lost another round in its battle against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on Thursday when a US federal judge dismissed the
432075
Sarah Deutsch is steaming. The attorney for Verizon Communications (VZ) regularly scours the Web from her Arlington [Va.] office and finds hundreds of new sites that use variations of Verizon's name.
100744
A US District Court Judge has dismissed the anti-trust and conspiracy claims made by the .com and .net registry, VeriSign, against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names &amp; Numbers (ICANN).
210067
VeriSignlost another round in its battle against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) last week when a US federal judge dismissed the company&#39;s antitrust claims, filed in an amended complaint.
106233
(InfoWorld) - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will discuss key projects and initiatives at a meeting this week, including the internationalization of the domain name system and a new, lucrative Web site registration practice that some object to. Other topics on the agenda for ICANN's 27th International meeting, to be held in Sao Paulo, include the group's strategic plan for 2007 to 2009 and next year's operating plan. Also on the discussion table are a workshop on IPV6 that will address what this new Internet protocol is and why it's needed, as well as a forum on the introduction of TLDs (top level domains). The meeting, which began Monday and ends Friday, will feature over 30 sessions and workshops. Attendees include engineers, businesspeople, government officials and private-sector executives from around the world. A major focus this week will be on the Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) initiative, a years-long project that aims to revamp the DNS system so that it can support domain names in a broad range of languages and alphabets that can't be represented via the ASCII character set, such as Arabic and Chinese. In Sao Paulo, ICANN will issue a status report on the IDN project and hold a training and a tutorial session. So far, through lab tests and meetings, ICANN is finding that the process to broaden the DNS' support for non-ASCII characters will be more difficult than originally thought, ICANN Chief Executive Officer and President Paul Twomey said Monday during a press conference. "This is really hard," he said, adding that ICANN hopes to have a technical solution in place by the end of 2007. "It has to be done carefully so that it works for the entire world." Attendees will also discuss a recent Web-site name registration practice called "kiting" and "tasting" that is generating much controversy. It involves the wholesale purchase of expired domain names, and the subsequent cancellation of most of them during a 5-day "grace" period allowed as part of the process. If canceled before the 5 days are up, the registration fee is fully refunded. Those who engage in this practice only keep the domain names that attract enough traffic to justify their registration fee, and proceed to "park" those Web sites and load them with pay-per-click ads. "There's a whole discussion going on in the community about whether there should be anything done about this," Twomey said. "There are people who think this isn't an appropriate behavior. [Others] think this is just the market at work." Those opposed to "kiting" are suggesting that ICANN impose some sort of fee whenever a registration is canceled before the grace period is over, a move they feel will discourage the practice.
580227
Antispam activists disagree about the effect of the major federal court judgment against three spammers. Antispam activists disagree about whether a $1.08 billion judgment against three spammers in Iowa last
121432
VeriSign on Thursday announced it would update the domain name servers for the .com and .net domains every few seconds rather than just twice a day to speed up Web site launches and limit disruption when changing hosting services.
54303
An Australian company that manages Internet domain name registrations acknowledged that it was partially responsible for a Web domain hijacking that left Public Access Networks (Panix), a New York Internet hosting company, without an Internet address over the weekend.
416752
InfoWorld - VeriSign, a vendor of cybersecurity products and operator of the .com and .net top-level domains, has replaced CEO Stratton Sclavos with a member of its board of directors.
483523
VeriSign (Quote, Chart) has come out on the losing end in its breach of contract and antitrust lawsuit against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).