VeriSign to fight on after ICANN suit dismissed
93786
A US federal judge yesterday tossed a crucial lawsuit between VeriSign Inc. and the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, but VeriSign vowed to continue the legal battle in a different jurisdiction.
267975
Networking website Facebook is to face legal action on Wednesday in a suit brought by a rival site's founders.
224768
A federal judge on Friday dismissed an antitrust complaint against a key Internet oversight group brought by a company that controls directories for guiding Internet users worldwide.
227698
ICANN snaps to attention The split between the founders of Registerfly.com, the leading domain name registrar, took a tawdry turn last week, as court documents filed by John Naruszewicz and Unifiednames, the corporation that owns Registerfly.com, made some shocking allegations against ousted CEO Kevin Medina.â¦
718765
By Frank Michael Russell, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  Jun. 3--Sclavos resigned as chief executive at VeriSign, the Mountain View Internet infrastructure company. Neither VeriSign nor Sclavos -- who had led the company since 1995 -- provided a reason for the departure.
694509
(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."
259252
A federal judge on Friday dismissed an antitrust complaint against a key Internet oversight group brought by a company that controls directories for guiding Internet users worldwide.    U.S...
336333
VeriSign Inc. VRSN.O on  Wednesday reported a quarterly profit versus a year-ago loss,  driven by an investment gain and strong demand for its  authentication tools and services for the Internet and  telecommunications networks.
509844
By Altus, Celeste  MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA: VeriSign has moved its PR account to Weber Shandwick, already putting the agency to work on various projects, including for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.
673288
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.
459086
(InfoWorld) - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is seeking ideas and opinions on ways to modify the agreement terms it enters into with Internet registrars to protect individuals and organizations that do business with them. The effort stems from theÂ recent debacle involving registrar RegisterFly, which ICANN had to strip of its accreditation due to poor quality of service, which prompted massive and loud complaints from many of its tens of thousands of customers. At its 29th International Public Meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, ICANN on Monday hosted a workshop to discuss possible changes to its Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) and steps it is taking to make sure registrars provide good service to their customers. Participants in the workshop, titled "Protection of Registrants," generally agreed that the RAA is due for a makeover to prevent another RegisterFly-like situation and because much has changed since the RAA was last amended about seven years ago. "We need to deal with registrar accreditation and the procedures by which we accommodate registrants," said Susan Crawford, an ICANN board member who moderated the discussion. Among the issues panelists and audience members debated was the need for Internet registrars -- companies ICANN accredits to sell Internet domain names to individuals and organizations -- to escrow their customers' data with ICANN or another third party. That way, in the event of a registrar meltdown, ICANN, which manages and oversees the Internet's domain name system, could access the customer data and help customers switch to another registrar. "This is important to registrants. We want to be able to reconstitute a registrar if it fails so that registrants can continue to have access to their domains and be able to work with them," Crawford said. Ironically, in its current form, the RAA has a data escrow provision but it hasn't been implemented for several reasons. "It put a burden on ICANN to receive data, so the cost was all on ICANN. And until recently, there wasn't a budget item for the registered data escrow program," Crawford said. Details on how this escrow will work need to be established, such as what will constitute a valid trigger for the data release and what data will be stored. Jon Nevett, policy and ethics vice president of Internet registrar Network Solutions, said that ICANN's Registrar Constituency, which he chairs, has worked in recent months on the data escrow program with ICANN, which recently requested proposals to provide escrow services. A key point for registrars is how ICANN will protect their customers' data if it needs to be transferred, Nevett said. "There is a lot of private information in this data," he said. One of the issues ICANN is trying to work through is what data would be put in escrow. Under the current RAA provisions that data includes: registrant, administrative contact, technical contact, billing contact, name servers and expiration dates. "When the provision was drafted, these were the elements that were believed to be critically necessary to restore the functionality of a registrar," said Mike Zupke, ICANN's Registrar Liaison Manager. Changing the data requirements would require amending the RAA, he said. This issue is an interesting one, considering individuals' privacy concerns when registering a domain name, concerns that have prompted the appearance of "proxy" services that let registrants "hide" from the public some of the information they submit to a registrar, Crawford said. Nevett argued that providing data to an escrow party that the registrant wants to keep from public view doesn't compromise privacy, because the escrow data wouldn't be publicly available. Meanwhile, Beau Brendler, director of Consumer Reports Webwatch, suggested that ICANN provide more information about registrars, including ratings, so that consumers can make better informed decisions when choosing one. There are about 900 registrars currently, according to ICANN. "Measures that increase compliance are good," Brendler said, adding that ICANN might consider setting up a system to rate registrars and hold registrars to best practices guidelines. Stacy Burnette, ICANN's director of contractual compliance, said that starting next month her team will publish a report twice a year with results from their registrar audits. Citing preliminary results, Burnette said that in March her team found that of 881 audited registrars, 19 had non-working Web sites, and that in April, 192 registrars had invoices that were overdue by 30 days or more. Based on these findings, her group is seeking compliance from the offending registrars. Her group is also currently doing a "code of conduct audit" to ensure that registrars are not engaging in conduct that would give "the appearance of impropriety," she said. Meanwhile, a future audit will focus on registrars' back-end systems performance, checking on issues like availability, downtime and outages, to see if they are meeting standards set in their agreements with ICANN. Moreover, an ongoing audit is focusing on registrar data retention requirements, while a future audit will verify whether registrars are maintaining the required commercial liability insurance levels, she said. "We want to encourage compliance to enhance ICANN's ability to preserve and enhance the operational stability, reliability, security and global interoperability of the Internet," Burnette said.
644510
(InfoWorld) - Participants made good progress discussing changes to Internet governance during an ICANN meeting in Puerto Rico that closed on Friday, leaders of the organization said. One topic that leaders worked on was the future enablement of non-Latin characters in domain names. ICANN hopes to support Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, and other characters in the future, but that's easier said than done. In 2003, ICANN made an attempt to widen the acceptable characters but found that its rules were too permissive, said Vint Cerf, ICANN's chairman. "There could be confusion between similar registrations that might mislead users," he said during a conference call to discuss the meeting. One potential source of confusion is that some characters in different alphabets might look similar but mean different things. For example, in Cyrillic, the word for "restaurant" looks in the Latin alphabet like "pectopaht." That opens the door for users to register domains in different languages in a way that could confuse users. ICANN hopes to develop rules that will prevent such confusion. ICANN plans to be able to test the use of international domain names live on the Internet by November. The test will include a mechanism to take them out instantly if they create a problem, Cerf said. The group has already tested the process in the lab. "We are confident that none of the infrastructure is likely to encounter problems, but you never really know until it's in that live environment," he said. The meeting also included a discussion on continuing to encourage IPv6 use. That's particularly important now because ICANN has determined the current system, supported by IPv4, for allocating the numerical address space will exhaust available numbers around 2011 or 2012, Cerf said. The wide adoption of IPv6 will support the continued addition of new numerical addresses. Cerf said there was significant progress in efforts to enable digital signatures to help authenticate the match between domain names and Internet addresses. The digital signature would validate that the Internet address associated with a domain name wasn't corrupted, either maliciously or accidentally. "This is a significant change in the core architecture of DNS," he said. The group also worked on developing a more regular process for allowing the introduction of additional generic top-level domains. ICANN worked on such policies in 2000 and 2003 and will take those experiences and try to establish a more regular practice for making additional domain names available, Cerf said. ICANN is on track for the introduction of new domains by the middle of 2008.
455966
Company settled legal disputes Monday with two of its largest remaining antagonists in a move that will ensure its antitrust deal will not be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. -The Washington Post
504423
(InfoWorld) - A contract for VeriSign Â to operate the .com domain should include infrastructure build-out requirements and make the company justify built-in prices increases, a lawyer for the GoDaddy.com registrar said Wednesday. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit organization that oversees the Internetâs technical infrastructure, has not put enough checks in place in a proposed extension of VeriSign's .com contract, said Christine Jones, general counsel for GoDaddy, during a hearing before a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. A presumption from ICANN that the .com contract will be renewed when it expires in November 2007 gives VeriSign a "monopoly" on operating the largest generic top-level domain, Jones said. "It's incredible to us that ICANN did not include an infrastructure investment requirement in the proposed .com agreement," she said. "In negotiating that agreement, VeriSign ensured that their revenue would increase, and ICANN ensured that their budget would benefit, but who's going to ensure the benefits of the public interest?" The proposed agreement allows VeriSign to increase wholesale site registration fees by 7 percent in four of the contract's six years. More oversight on pricing is needed, Jones said. "Other legitimate monopolies ... must justify their price increases, and VeriSign, the monopoly provider, should be required to do the same," she said. But VeriSign already spends significant money improving its Internet infrastructure every year, said Ken Silva, VeriSign's chief security officer. The ICANN presumption that it will renew the .com contract encourages VeriSign to continue investing in infrastructure, instead of waiting until it knows it has a new contract, he said. The .com domain has never crashed in the last seven years, but price increases may be necessary as attacks against Internet domains become more complex, Silva added. "We're not talking about commodity hardware here," Silva said. "There's no automatic price increase. What there is, is a possibility of a price increase, based on the security and stability needs we have at the time." ICANN President and Chief Executive Officer Paul Twomey also defended the contract, saying his organization is fostering competition in other ways such as creating more top-level domains. There are also nearly 800 site registrars competing for business, he said. But Senator Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican, questioned the .com contract. "The question a lot of people are asking is, what's wrong with bidding out .com?" he said. "Why not let VeriSign win it, if they can, with a competitive bid?" Senators also asked whether the U.S. Department of Commerce should renew its memorandum of understanding with ICANN for the organization to continue oversight of the Internet's technical infrastructure. The memorandum expires at the end of this month. GoDaddy's Jones criticized ICANN for too often conducting business, including the proposed .com agreement, "behind closed doors." She called on Congress to require ICANN to create a plan to increase the Internet community's confidence in it. Even though ICANN needs to improve its transparency and accountability to the Internet community, the memorandum should be extended, said John Kneuer, acting assistant secretary for communications and information at the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration. ICANN is taking steps to improve support from its constituencies, he said.
399274
New York-based Internet service provider Panix is working to recover from an apparent domain-name hijacking.
3901
The U.S. Commerce Department said on   Friday it would retain its oversight of the company that   manages Internet domain names, renewing an agreement that was   scheduled to expire this weekend.
40590
A U.S. district court has dismissed an   antitrust suit filed by microchip maker Broadcom Corp. BRCM.O   against Qualcomm Inc. QCOM.O, although Broadcom said it would   continue to pursue the case.