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VeriSign dealt another legal blow in ICANN suit
Round two to ICANN
By Scarlet Pruitt, IDG News Service
Published: 16:35 GMT, 27 August 04
VeriSign lost another round in its battle against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) on Thursday when a US federal judge dismissed the company's anti-trust claims, filed in an amended complaint.
The decision, made in the US District Court for the Central District of California, is the second setback for VeriSign in its attempt to prove that ICANN has overstepped its bounds as the Internet's technical coordinating body. In May, the same court dismissed VeriSign's original anti-trust complaint.
VeriSign, which manages the .com and .net domain names, filed its initial suit against ICANN in February, claiming the group had acted outside its charter by delaying the introduction of new VeriSign services, such as the company's Site Finder service which redirects requests for non-existent web addresses. In addition to accusing ICANN of being a de facto regulator of the domain name system, company also alleged breach of contract, seeking unspecified damages.
After the original anti-trust claims were dismissed, VeriSign filed an amended complaint in June alleging, among other claims, that ICANN's processes were being controlled by the VeriSign's competitors, which are members of various ICANN advisory groups.
Following a hearing on Monday, federal Judge A. Howard Matz dismissed the anti-trust claims in the amended complaint. However, VeriSign can still refile its breach of contract claims against ICANN in state court.
In a 16-page ruling, Matz called VeriSign's anti-trust contentions "deficient."
"There is nothing inherently conspiratorial about a 'bottom-up' policy development process that considers or even solicits input from advisory groups," the ruling states.
ICANN president and CEO Paul Twomey called the ruling an important confirmation of ICANN's structure.
"This judgment puts any myth that we are an anti-trust cartel firmly to bed," Twomey said. Twomey added that he was disappointed that VeriSign chose a legal channel for its complaints, saying that he would have preferred to sit down with the company and work the situation out.
"They want to play this out in court at the cost of Internet users," Twomey said.
VeriSign representatives were not immediately available to comment on the decision.
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