ICANN and Verisign settle over SiteFinder

Tue Oct 25 12:53:58 UTC 2005

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005, Florian Weimer wrote:

>> http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8DEL2TO7.htm?
>> campaign_id=apn_tech_down&chan=tc
>
> I don't understand what VeriSign receives in return for their kowtow
> (under the agreement, they basically waive any right to criticize
> ICANN's role).

They get to continue to be .COM registry forever as new agreement
would extend to 2012 and then automatically extended further without 
formal process as it happened recently for .NET. They also are going
to be able to increase registry fees for .COM by 7% per year which to
put it in perspective can potentially be $2 increase 4 years from now.

> Two possible explanations:

2+2=5, right? :)

>  * ICANN signalled a positive outcome of a future Sitefinder review
>    under the new process.
>
>  * ICANN promised to grant VeriSign the DNSSEC root and .ARPA
>    maintenance without tender (the "Root Server Management Transition
>    Agreement" goes into that direction; actually, the .ARPA stuff is
>    the interesting one).
>
>  * VeriSign has recognized that they couldn't win in court, and
>    suddenly want to play nice.
>

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william at elan.net