Verisign vs. ICANN

Mon Aug 16 14:43:19 UTC 2004

I'm not a lawyer but I still think businesses have a valid lawsuit against 
Verisign for whatever the legal term is for using their copyrighted names 
and likenesses.  With SiteFinder it guarantees Verisign 'owns' any domain a 
particular company may no have yet purchased until such time that they do. 
And until they do their property gets branded as if it were Verisign's. 
That's my chief complaint against Verisign.

There is also the problem that no one can easily verify non-existence of 
ANY domain when the SiteFinder is deployed with the Wildcard A record, this 
is almost certainly detrimental.

The BIND source was modified in response to CUSTOMERS REQUESTS.  It seems 
as though Verisign intends to implement it's will by legal maneuvering. 
It's akin to Microsoft being told by say RedHat that they can't have 
multiple user logins because Linux does that.  Or that Windows can't have a 
good, useful CLI subsystem even though customers are clamoring for it.

I'm not certain what other legal beef Verisign may have with ICANN (and any 
of the others mentioned in their legal proceedings) but it's certainly not 
any conspiracy, an option was simply provided at the outcry by a large, 
well respected, technical community to a change in infrastructure we all 
rely on that caused problematic effects.

It's very regrettable that Verisign's lawyers decided it was necessary to 
go about this.

As part of a a disclaimer:  Any various mentioned parties were used above 
in a purely hypothetical manner and do not represent any companies actual 
intentions.  Any mentioned copyrighted names are the property of their 
respective copyright or other property holders.