Judge A. Howard Matz of the U.S. District Court in California ruled that VeriSign cannot allege that the "co-conspirators" named by the company controlled ICANN's board. The court also held that VeriSign cannot allege, based on the ICANN bylaws, that supporting organizations within ICANN's structure, which include VeriSign's competitors, dominate the organization's board.
Conspiracy Charged
The court dismissed VeriSign's original complaint on May 18th, but allowed the company to file an amended complaint to strengthen its legal arguments. The company claimed that its competitors that are members of ICANN conspired with the organization's board of directors to block VeriSign's plans to launch new services.
The initial suit, filed earlier this year, alleged that ICANN exceeded its authority and improperly attempted to regulate VeriSign's business in violation of its charter and its agreements with VeriSign. In doing so, VeriSign charged, ICANN has attempted to become the de-facto regulator of the domain-name system, stifling the introduction of new Internet services.
Dispute Centers on SiteFinder
Under an agreement with ICANN, VeriSign has a virtual monopoly over all .com and .net domain names, collecting a small fee for each from a large number of registrars.
At the heart of the dispute is VeriSign's "wild card" SiteFinder service, which redirects all unknown or unregistered .com or .net domain names to the VeriSign Web site. SiteFinder was introduced last fall and subsequently pulled after ICANN issued a cease-and-desist order and competitors filed fair-trade complaints.
"The U.S. federal court's decision serves as another important affirmation of ICANN's multi-stakeholder participatory model and reaffirms the ICANN structure," says John Jeffrey, ICANN's general counsel, in a statement. "ICANN is not subject to capture by any commercial or other interest, including VeriSign," he maintains.
ICANN is an international organization responsible for coordinating Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) top-level domain name system management, and root server system management functions.