VeriSign's battle with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers over the controversial SiteFinder service has gone to a new level, with VeriSign taking to a California state court the suit freshly thrown out by a federal court.
But where the federal suit tried and failed to hang anti-trust violations on ICANN, VeriSign's California suit filed August 27 charges that ICANN violated the terms of a 2001 contract making VeriSign the .com and .net administrator. However, the state suit reiterates VeriSign's prime charge that ICANN wrongfully tried to pit SiteFinder out of business.
"Were VeriSign to defer offering such services to the public during the effective period of the 2001 .com Registry Agreement, or to modify such services due to ICANN's conduct and threats, VeriSign will suffer irreparable losses of revenue from third parties, profits, market share, competitive position, reputation and good will," according to the new state court filing. "Furthermore, millions of Internet users will be deprived of the improved functionality and quality of VeriSign's services."
VeriSign introduced SiteFinder in the fall of 2003, but critics jumped all over the service, accusing VeriSign of exploiting Web surfers' typographical errors or mistaken domain information for SiteFinder site advertising profit.
ICANN threatened sanctions against VeriSign and the company pulled SiteFinder down – and also sued ICANN, accusing the body of unreasonably prohibiting Internet innovation. ICANN, for its part, slapped SiteFinder in a July report in which ICANN accused the service of violating commonly-accepted codes of online conduct.
Although that report found SiteFinder created no legitimately catastrophic effects, it violated "community standards and caused harm to individual users and enterprises," through redirecting misspelled or nonexistent domain names to its own Website purported to help surfers find the direction they actually wanted to go.
Neither side has yet commented publicly on the new VeriSign litigation.
