ICANN moves to move VeriSign lawsuit to Paris
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com November 12, 2004, 5:31 PM PT. This priority retains its ranking at number five as more and more companies deploy Web services to share business logic, data and processes with each other and with clients.
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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.
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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.
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VeriSign's proposed deal with ICANN for oversight of the .com domain has received final approval from the US Commerce Department, removing the last hurdle to extending the agreement until 2012.
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(InfoWorld) - VeriSign plans to invest $100 million over three years to expand tenfold the DNS (domain name system) infrastructure it operates for the .com and .net top-level domains. The DNS is a multitier system that translates the names given to Internet hosts, such as www.infoworld.com, into numerical addresses. The part VeriSign plans to expand, the top tier, indicates where to find answers for addresses in the .com and .net domains. If it fails, or slows, many Internet services break or falter. This happened on Tuesday, whenÂ attackers disruptedÂ the operations of root DNS servers operated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the U.S. Department of Defense. "We're going to make that kind of attack harder against our services," said Ken Silva, VeriSign's chief security officer, on Thursday. Although VeriSign's investment will make the DNS more resistant to such attacks, "This isn't just about the attacks, this is about keeping ahead of the pace of network growth," he added. Services such as Internet telephony or video delivery rely heavily on the DNS infrastructure, and are more susceptible to variations in its performance than applications such as Web browsing. An additional 40 millisecond delay in providing an address might not be noticeable to Web surfers, but it can have a big effect on VOIP (voice over Internet Protcol) operators, Silva said. Through a project known as Titan, VeriSign will reinforce its DNS infrastructure in two ways. The first will be to increase server and bandwidth capacity tenfold at around 20 existing sites, taking bandwidth from 20GbpsÂ to over 200Gbps. The changes will allow VeriSign to respond to over 4 trillion DNS queries a day, from 400 billion today. VeriSign will also expand the number of sites where it operates DNS servers to around 100, Silva said. Those extra sites will bring the DNS closer to regional network operators in countries such as Ireland, one of the trial sites for VeriSign's new infrastructure. There, it has peered with many of the local network operators, so the DNS requests of Irish Internet users don't have to travel halfway across Europe to be resolved: they are dealt with on the spot. VeriSign already operates regional sites in Brazil, China, Egypt, Kenya and South Korea, and plans to open sites in Chile, Germany, India and South Africa, among others. In addition to improving performance, these changes will make the system more secure by restricting the effects of attacks such as the one seen Tuesday to a smaller geographic area, Silva said. VeriSign expects the number of attacks launched over the Internet to increase in size and scope by 50 percent a year over the next two years. Even without an increase in the number of attacks, VeriSign faces a significant challenge in keeping all its DNS servers up to date and in step with one another. Much of the theoretical work on that was begun in another project, Atlas, in 2002, Silva said. "It has gotten to the point where we can now go for scalability," he added. VeriSign has developed new "zone push" techniques to distribute database changes, and will use a VPN (virtual private network) and dedicated data connections to ensure server updates are not disrupted, Silva said. Stratton Sclavos, VeriSign's CEO, is due to provide more details on the company's Titan project in a keynote address at theÂ RSA ConferenceÂ in San Francisco at 2 p.m. Pacific Time on Thursday. Â
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Yahoo&#39;s face-off with France over Nazi paraphernalia took its latest twist Monday, with a federal appeals court reversing an earlier decision that found the First Amendment protected the Web portal from legal action over the issue in the United States.
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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).
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(InfoWorld) - After a dozen years serving as the chief executive of VeriSign,Â Stratton Sclavos resignedÂ on May 29, leaving some onlookers wondering why, even as longtime critics on Wall St. openly praised his departure. The 45-year-old CEO's abdication of his leadership position at Mountain View, Calif.-based VeriSign -- a technology company with a business model so diverse it defies simple definition -- produced an immediate vote of confidence in the company from some in the investment community. Yet, at the same time, people who did business with the executive and claim to know him well contend that the predisposition toward controversialÂ acquisitionsÂ and far-ranging business plans that led to Sclavos' push-out at the hands of the company's board, was undeniably the same vision that has allowed VeriSign to become the IT industry giant it is today. In the company's most recently reported financials, for fiscal year 2006, VeriSign reported $1.58 billion in annual sales. Through its many acquisitions, including such brand names asÂ Internet registrar Network SolutionsÂ for roughly $15 billion in 2000, VeriSign created a business model that fused its original expertise in Web security technology with everything from network connectivity services to online domain name registrations. OtherÂ buy-upsÂ led by Sclavos over the years of his tenure included providers of mobile phone ring tones, online content aggregation tools, and even blog site publishing capabilities. In many cases, Wall St. critics questioned the need for such diversification, even when the companies the CEO was buying were adding to VeriSign's bottom line. With the executive gone, some institutional investors began calling for the firm to pare down its interests rapidly to discard many of the company's far-flung additions. In a report published on the same day that news of Sclavos' resignation emerged, analysts at investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston noted the CEO's departure "removes a significant overhang related to investors' general view of VeriSign's senior management as a historically under-performing team." Among the immediate benefits of Scalvos' departure would be the opportunity for VeriSign to sell off some of the "non-core assets" that the CEO had brought under the company's auspices, according to the report. In a similar note that at least conceded that VeriSign "benefited from Sclavos' strategic vision," analysts at Wall St. stalwart Merrill-Lynch pointed out that the resignation could lead to the sale of all or parts of the company. Â The investment firm also speculated that VeriSign's Board may have "viewed [Sclavos'] unbroken tenure as an obstacle to fundamental changes to the business." With VeriSign officials denying that the resignation had anything to do with an ongoing review of the company's historical stock option grant practices -- being carried out by a group of its board members -- onlookers who know Sclavos well said that the executive's drive to keep VeriSign relevant with the latest trends in information technology is what ultimately led to his exodus. Neil Creighton, chef executive of managed security services firm Chosen Security, was CEO of digital certificates vendor GeoTrust when Sclavos and VeriSign bought the firm for $125 million in May 2006. Creighton said he was surprised and even saddened by the news of Sclavos' stepping down, and that he spent much of the day Tuesday wondering how it ever came to pass. "When you look at the company and what it has done over the last twelve years, it's hard not to give Stratton credit for building VeriSign from a $10 million security provider into a company doing $1.6 billion in sales," Creighton said. "Other security companies who were competing with VeriSign in the nineties are either gone or have market caps of $200 million right now." Creighton said that a combination of Wall St. demands for more clarity in VeriSign's business model, along with recent turnover on the company's board, most likely forced Sclavos to move on in the face of mounting criticism. A desire by those parties to shift the strategic direction of VeriSign wouldn't easily gel with its former CEO's aggressive long-term vision, he said. Creighton feels that a lack of understanding for where Sclavos wanted to take the company in the future probably led for some VeriSign insiders to echo investors' calls for a clearer short-term focus. "He is a very visionary guy, and people like that aren't usually right all the time, but VeriSign may be sacrificing the long-term journey he's been planning for years in favor of meeting short-term goals," said Creighton. "There's a lot of pressure to look short-term versus long-term and he was a long term-kind of guy; perhaps his vision was ultimately too big for other people involved with company." While some outsiders might speculate where VeriSign would be today if it had stuck to the lucrative security market, Creighton, whose company directly competes with the firm, said he has no doubts that Sclavos made the right call. "His old competitors aren't even around anymore for the most part," he said. "If he sat there as a pure security player, VeriSign would have been a much different company, and it would have struggled a lot more than it has." Other business relations of Sclavos' said that the executive may have been wiser not to stray so far from the security segment, but observed that it remains hard to argue with the results of the CEO's work when considering the scale of VeriSign today. "If VeriSign had stuck with its core competencies and worked around fringes of all that, with security comes high margins, and maybe it could have been more profitable, but this company also has high margins with its security, registry and digital certificates businesses today," said Georges Yared, a senior partner directing international sales for both Wessels, Arnold and Henderson, and ThinkEquity Partners. "The only real issue was with the company's board; the stock has had some issues these last four to five years, and Stratton wanted to expand the business beyond the most profitable areas, and therein lies the rub," said Yared, who is also the author of several financial self-help books and writes a blog for AOL's Money & Finance portal. Yared, who has known Sclavos since before his days at VeriSign and said he often brought European investors to meet with the CEO in Silicon Valley, claims that on Wall St. the departed business leader was a polarizing figure, with some buying into his vision, and others extremely unhappy with his performance. After Sclavos resigned, Yared said, several institutional investment firms that have never before purchased VeriSign's stock immediately began to buy in. "It seems like people either loved Stratton or they didn't like him very much at all, and he was certainly a fossil by Silicon Valley standards, staying on top for 12 years," Yared said. "The knock on him will be that he was overly acquisitive, that he wanted to acquire whatever he saw as vital to growing VeriSign, and with that came a few mistakes and overpayments." Creighton and Yared uniformly agreed on one point -- predicting that it likely won't be long before Sclavos finds a new effort to lead. "I wish he could have back last five or six years, that he would have conducted the company a bit differently, because I'm a big fan and I'm sorry to see him go," Yared said. "But I wouldn't imagine it will be very long before we see Stratton in Silicon Valley again."
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Internet search engine Google Inc. said Monday it was weighing a possible appeal after a Paris court ordered it to pay 200,000 euros (&#36;260,000) plus costs to luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton for breach of trademark.
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The web giant argues out of both sides of its web portal in trying to get a lawsuit by Chinese dissidents dismissed. Two years ago, the company took the opposite side in a dispute over the online auctioning of Nazi paraphernalia in France.
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New York-based Internet service provider Panix is working to recover from an apparent domain-name hijacking.
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(InfoWorld) - The European Commission welcomed moves in the U.S. to free ICANN, the Internet domain name manager, from its historic ties to the U.S. government on Monday. The U.S. Commerce Department willÂ retain its oversight of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, for three more years under a new agreement that took effect at the beginning of this month. The new agreement grants ICANN more freedom from U.S. government involvement, but stops short of full privatization, which many in the Internet industry want. European Commission spokesman Martin Selmayr said the Commerce Department had given "clear indications that this three year agreement between ICANN and the U.S. government would be the last." "This is good news. Last year there were doubts about whether the U.S. would privatize ICANN," Selmayr said. The new agreement, which runs until 2009, is subject to a review in 18 months. If in the review the Commerce Department concludes that ICANN is stable, transparent, and accountable enough, it could decide to grant the nonprofit organization full autonomy immediately, the Commerce Department said in a statement Friday. In addition to promising full autonomy, the U.S. government has shaped the new three-year agreement to help pave the way towards independence. From now on ICANN will determine how it works and what it works on, ICANN said. It will no longer have to submit half-yearly progress reports to the Commerce Department. Instead it will publish an annual progress report on the internet for everyone to see. Many observers argue that U.S. government involvement in ICANN is slowing the international development of the Internet down and should pull out without delay. Others warn that ICANN isn't ready to fend for itself. They believe the organization hasn't yet proven that it can handle the entire task of domain name management alone, and if the government withdraws now this could compromise security and stability of the internet. Â ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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The U.S. Commerce Department on Thursday approved a bid by VeriSign Inc. to run the key directories that keep track of the Internet's ".com" domain names.
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VeriSign is undertaking a $100 million expansion of a crucial part of the system that speeds Web users to their destinations.
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Networking website Facebook is to face legal action on Wednesday in a suit brought by a rival site's founders.
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ICANN has proposed a schedule for the fast-tracking of non-contentious IDN ccTLDs that would allow for new non-Latin Alphabet top-level domains as early as Summer '08.
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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved two new sponsored Internet domains, .post and .travel, specifically for the post and travel industries.