Verisign vs. ICANN

Fri Jun 18 05:58:00 UTC 2004

> > ...  i'm not a defendant, just a named co-conspirator.
> 
> Hah? Are they also naming individually all the dns operators that installed 
> bind patch and specifically enabled it so that wildcards would not work?

the lawsuit doesn't mention the bind patch.  they seem to be upset about my
work on the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee.  what their
"First Amended Complaint" says about me is that:

        Paul Vixie is a Site Finder co-conspirator [...].  

        Paul Vixie is an existing provider of competitive services for
        registry operations, including providing TLD domain name hosting
        services for ccTLDs and gTLDs, and a competitor of VeriSign for
        new registry operations.  [...]

(y'know, i'd pay Real Money for Adobe Acrobat Professional for SuSE 9.1/amd64,
by which i could scan-convert PDF files instead of typing in stuff by hand --
my win32 laptop has more than 70 days of downtime and i'm going for 3 digits.)

verisign's official position throughout the sitefinder launch was that "users
are free to disable it if they want to."  they did NOT want this characterized
as them shoving their sitefinder service down anybody's unwilling throat.  so
i don't expect any action to occur against folks who installed a BIND patch.

while i'm not qualified to give myself legal advice, it looks like they're
trying to get their complaint qualified, which requires the existence of a
"conspiracy to restrain", which requires the existence of "co-conspirators."
i guess verisign needs to qualify me as a conspirator, so i have to be called
a "competitor".  ain't the u.s. legal system just grand, though?
-- 
Paul Vixie