Domain name registrar and complementary software provider Go Daddy has sued VeriSign in federal court here, asking for a temporary restraining order against the Site Finder service VeriSign premiered earlier this month.
Site Finder was set up to re-route mistyped or misspelled domain names toward a list of alternatives the user might have been seeking, but critics jumped the service almost immediately as something short of being an outright hijacking capability.
"VeriSign has hijacked this entire process," said Go Daddy president Bob Parsons. "When the user is sent to VeriSign's advertising page, VeriSign gets paid by the advertiser when the user clicks a link to get off the page." Parsons estimated that's worth about $150 million a year to VeriSign, based on their own alleged estimates.
But calling VeriSign a hijacker of any kind would make for an irony of a sort. It was VeriSign, then known as Network Solutions, Inc. which registered Sex.com, the adult domain hijacked by Stephen Cohen with a forged letter to the registrar, provoking a court case that got Sex.com's rightful owner, Gary Kremen, both his domain back and a $65 million damage judgment against Cohen.
Parsons also accused Site Finder or hijacking traffic from actual as opposed to misspelled or mistyped domains.
"It is important to understand that VeriSign's charter to act as the .com and .net registry was never intended to let them manipulate the domain name routing system for their own profit," Parsons said, adding that it would be "a very dangerous precedent" if Site Finder wasn't stopped.
"I think it's just more oppressive willful behavior on VeriSign's part," Kremen told AVN.com after he learned about the Go Daddy suit.
The International Commission for Assigned Names and Numbers has called on VeriSign to take down Site Finder. But VeriSign doesn't seem to be ready to give up the service just yet, despite a small firestorm of criticism and at least some actual or threatened litigation.
The company said September 23 that as of the day before, Site Finder had received 65 million visits from Internet users, with its search tool proving the most popular function with over 11 million usages. VeriSign claims Site Finder has over 5 million unique visitors a day since its mid-month launch.
"It's really a sad thing that they're doing this," Kremen said of VeriSign regarding Site Finder and the accusations of hijacking. "It's just more bad behavior, the kind they did with me. But now it's some bigger companies that are more important and that's really a sad thing.
"There's a lot of ramifications to this that people don't talk about yet," Kremen continued. "It messes up anti-spam filters, it can mess up e-mails, and I'm not the only person who might be complaining about that. They probably didn't realize how many things this would break."
Kremen still awaits the final resolution of his own case with VeriSign, in which he wants them held accountable for the Sex.com hijack.
