Battling VeriSign over whether its domain name can be stolen is one thing, but hearing VeriSign say that if Sex.com wins it would cripple the Internet is something else again, says Sex.com's long-battling founder and chief executive officer.
VeriSign says that if the courts decide they were culpable in the 1990s hijacking of the Sex.com domain, it wouldn't just cripple the Net, it would "jeopardize the national economic benefit for e-commerce."
That's not the way Sex.com chief Gary Kremen sees it.
"(VeriSign) has dug a hole so deep and they can't dig themselves out of it," says Kremen, who has already been through the mill recovering the domain from cybersquatter Stephen Cohen. Kremen argues, in essence, that VeriSign's earlier negligence made it possible for Sex.com to be hijacked at all.
Cohen took the domain when VeriSign (known then as Network Solutions, Inc.) failed to authenticate what turned out to be a forged letter Cohen submitted in 1995 before they turned the Sex.com domain over to Cohen. Kremen sued Cohen and won a $65 million judgment against him, with Cohen fleeing the country and remaining a fugitive ever since. Kremen's battle with VeriSign now stands with the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals asking the California Supreme Court to determine whether a domain name is property that can be stolen or converted.
"NSI is telling its customers that their domain names aren't really theirs to keep," says Kremen's attorney, Jim Wagstaffe. "NSI wants to reap 21st century profits but not to be subject to 21st century law."
"NSI insists that requiring of it a duty to care for the domain name registrations of customers would threaten the survival of all registrars, raise fees to unacceptable levels and somehow disable the Internet worldwide," said Ellen Rony, an expert witness in the Sex.com suit. "Such hyperbole miscasts the issue at bar. Kremen asks to hold NSI accountable for its misdeeds in facilitating the re-registration of Sex.Com to an unauthorized third party and violating its own published policies. Kremen merely seeks the remedial rights that California affords owners of property."
Eric Grimm, an Internet attorney based in Michigan, asks whether VeriSign isn't threatening by implication to "hold the domain name system hostage" by its positioning in the Sex.com case. "When VeriSign couches its ‘Internet will break,’ argument in the passive voice," he says, "it is important to ask who will do the alleged 'breaking'...threatening to break it unless VeriSign is allowed to re-write all the rules, that everyone else must play by, in VeriSign’s favor.
"The only real threats to the stability of the DNS are: the instability that customers worldwide already are suffering because VeriSign cannot be trusted to do its job competently and has no incentive to improve until it is held accountable for the mischief it causes; and - if VeriSign is actually making the threat it seems to be making - the prospect that VeriSign might actually try to sabotage the DNS and retaliate against any court that holds it accountable for its incompetence and mischief."
YNOTMasters.com general counsel Greg Geelan says VeriSign's position isn't just disingenuous, it's erroneous. "(I)t will have the opposite effect," he says. "Acknowledging property rights in registered domain names will benefit e-commerce. If individuals have some degree of confidence that their websites cannot be hijacked...without compensation, they will have greater incentive to invest thousands of dollars building and maintaining online businesses, which will benefit our national economy."
