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 VeriSign Sued Over SiteFinder "Service"
posted by michael on Thursday September 18 2003, @06:48PM
dmehus writes "It was only a matter of time, the pundits said, and they were right. Popular Enterprises, LLC., an Orlando, Florida based cybersquatting so-called "search services" company, has filed a lawsuit in Orlando federal court against VeriSign, Inc. over VeriSign's controversial SiteFinder "service." "
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"While PopularEnterprises has had a dodgy history of buying up thousands of expired domain names and redirecting them to its Netster.com commercial "search services" site, the lawsuit is most likely a good thing, as it provides one more avenue to pursue in getting VeriSign to terminate SiteFinder. According to the lawsuit, the company contends alleges antitrust violations, unfair competition and violations of the Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. It asks the court to order VeriSign to put a halt to the service.
VeriSign spokesperson Brian O'Shaughnessy said the company has not yet seen the lawsuit and that it doesn't comment on pending litigation. If you want more details, you can get full details in the story by Reuters."
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VeriSign Sued Over SiteFinder "Service"
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"While PopularEnterprises has had a dodgy history of buying up thousands of expired domain names and redirecting them to its Netster.com commercial "search services" site,"
Oh, I see. When someone takes the effort and business risk that an abandoned domain name will or will not pay for itself in traffic. And when that someone is legitimately providing a directory service for a domain name that would have otherwise been a 'dead end'; then they are engaging in a "dodgy practice". But when Verisign does it, and does it by exploiting a monopoly position in competition with others (but without the cost of domain registration), then they are just fine.
Harvesting traffic from domain names that others abandon is a perfectly legitimate practice. If a tenant at the shopping mall does not pay their rent, then they are evicted and another tenant may move in. Is that a "dodgy practice" in the brick-and-mortar world?
Elsewhere on this site, we have an ITU official asking whether it would be preferable to provide a directory service instead of an error page. The question itself ignores the reality that there are businesses which are based on just that principle. The real question is whether we want such services to be the result of private initiative, built upon legitimate expectations of how DNS is supposed to work, or whether we just want to provide another revenue stream leveraged from a limited monopoly.
The timing of this move by Verisign was masterful, however, since it has completely overtaken any discussion here of the consent order into which Verisign just entered under which the Federal Trade Commission will be overseeing their marketing efforts for the foreseeable future, in settlement of a deceptive trade practices complaint which the FTC had brought against them.
"Dodgy business" indeed.
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In an unusual departure from the norm, Verisign has apparently decided to post a response on the sitefinder site itself:
Verisign's Response [verisign.com]
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