VeriSign Wants Ability To Suspend Domains Without Court Order

GeorgeK writes "VeriSign, the monopoly registry operator for .com/.net domain names, has submitted a proposal to ICANN (PDF) describing an 'Anti-Abuse' policy. If allowed to proceed with such a policy, they would become judge, jury and executioner, with the ability to suspend or even cancel alleged 'abusive' domain names without due process for registrants. The proposal even recognizes that legitimate domain names may be taken down improperly, and offers a 'protest' procedure. However, VeriSign does not appear to offer any ability to protest an accusation of abuse before the suspension or cancellation. They intend to 'shoot first and ask questions later.'"

Re:Monopoly?

[imric]

You can be a monopoly. It's not illegal.

It's illegal to abuse monopoly status, though.

Send Comments to ICANN

[GeorgeK]

Thanks for accepting the article. ICANN is still reviewing the proposal. If folks share my concerns, please do send them your comments by emailing [e-mail] (from the top of ICANN's Registry Services Evaluation Process page [icann.org]). You can view comments by others here [icann.org]. EasyDNS has submitted their concerns too.

At a minimum, they should open up a formal 30 day public comment period that is widely advertised, in order that domain name registrants can be heard.

Re:Of Course...

[Pf0tzenpfritz]

IIRC, ICANN/IANA tried to sue them out of business in the late 1990s when they partially screwed up DNS (replacing NXDOMAIN answers with their "domain finder" landing page). VeriSign won in the last second using legal tricks and soon made friends with similar minds in the US gov. Since then they grew rapidly and -which irony- went from rogue provider to "security provider" and even CA. Wikipedia has some very insightful articled about the "domain finder" affair.