A proposed service by VeriSign in which you could bid on domain names that are about to expire has been approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), despite critics' fears that the service might spell doom for smaller companies who make their primary living selling domain names.
At its semi-annual meeting, ICANN approved a twelve-month trial of the proposed Wait Listing Service, as VeriSign calls it, to be offered through accredited registrars, according to the language of a resolution formally adopted at the March 6 meeting.
"Most of the other registrars are against it because they can't do it," said Sex.com chief Gary Kremen, who had to get his domain back from a cyberjacker in court, after former VeriSign partner Network Solutions let it change hands on a forged letter.
"I think it's going to lead to more lawsuits against ICANN, which is consuming an increasing part of their legal budget," Kremen told AVNOnline.com, "and (against) VeriSign using monopoly powers unfairly as its sole registry for dot-com and dot-net."
A small group of eight domain name registrars already sued VeriSign and ICANN together in February to stop the Wait Listing Service plan. As attorney Derek Newman put it to reporters in a recent interview, most of them feared the service would put them out of business, accusing VeriSign of abusing its "monopoly position" as the administrator of dot-com and dot-net domains.
One such smaller registrar, GoDaddy, had earlier asked both ICANN and the U.S. Department of Commerce to re-examine VeriSign's registry administration position in part because of the Wait Listing System and in part because of another controversial VeriSign project, SiteFinder - aimed at directing traffic coming from mistyped or non-existent Web addresses to a VeriSign page offering the closest possible alternative destinations - which VeriSign was pressured by ICANN to take down last fall.
"An entire industry has grown up during the past few years around the backordering of domain names," GoDaddy co-founder Bob Parsons said, in a letter to ICANN, the Commerce Department, and the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. "The deal VeriSign wants to offer consumers is worse than the options they already have available from the existing market. To boot, if approved, VeriSign's WLS system will destroy its competition in the backorder market."
VeriSign itself sued ICANN in February, saying ICANN "failed to follow a clear, consistent, and uniform" process for allowing companies to introduce new services including the Wait Listing Service.
"The framework embodied in our contractual agreements with ICANN strikes a careful balance between the need to give ICANN the authority it needs to perform its technical functions and the need to preserve a registry's flexibility to innovate and introduce new services," said VeriSign government relations vice president Tom Galvin at the time of the filing. "ICANN has upset that balance by making assertions of control over services and by administering its authority inconsistently and unfairly."
VeriSign said the litigation was aimed mostly at "gaining clarity" about ICANN's effectiveness and credibility regarding Internet governance. "An effective, credible ICANN,,, will help promote innovation and new services that benefit millions of Internet users," Galvin had said.
GoDaddy announced a pledge March 3 to contribute $100,000 toward ICANN's defense in the VeriSign suit. "VeriSign is a huge, multi-billion dollar corporation. ICANN is a small, non-profit organization," Parsons said at the time. "ICANN's principle purpose is to regulate the equitable operation of the domain name system. VeriSign has sued ICANN for doing exactly what it was designed to do. The zealous defense of this lawsuit is critical to the stability of the Internet."
