Court Case Against VeriSign, .Com Monopoly Revived

netczar writes "According to a post by John Levine on CircleID, as well as other sources, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has reversed a lower court decision which threw out an antitrust lawsuit several years ago by the Coalition for ICANN Transparency (CFIT) against VeriSign. Levine writes: 'Back in 2005 an organization called the Coalition for ICANN Transparency burst upon the scene at the Vancouver ICANN meeting, and filed an anti-trust suit against VeriSign for their monopoly control of the .COM registry and of the market in expiring .COM domains. They didn't do very well in the trial court, which granted Verisign's motion to dismiss the case. But yesterday the Ninth Circuit reversed the trial court and put the suit back on track.'"

Re:Please, please ...

[John Hasler]

If only that was the worst thing they've ever done...

Don't get all excited here

[Sycraft-fu]

There are two things that give me pause with regards to this:

1) There are other organizations that have a "monopoly" on various TLDs. While .com may be the one that most people recognize, doesn't really matter. So it may well be arguable that Verisign's ownership isn't problematic or illegal since there are other TLDs to choose from and others that are "owned" in the same fashion.

2) This is the 9th circuit court. These guys get overturned on a regular basis. Quite often when there is a controversial case, they rule based on what they think the law ought to be, rather than what the law is. Their decision then gets overturned by the Supreme Court.

So don't get all worked up at this point. See how it goes from here.

This is silly.

[yourassOA]

How would multiple companies make .com registry better? How would the companies cooperate with each other without increasing cost? Will there be a company / gov agency to oversee the other companies? We have multiple companies for vehicle registry were I live and it sucks networks/computers always down and no one fixes it because its someone else problem making for 20 min+ wait times to register the vehicle while some Win 95a 486 churns away.
Now if they are so worried about monopolies why don't they go after the power company? They buy gov regulated power and sell to the consumer at an unregulated rate at 3-4 times what they pay. Plus we have to pay for the company suppling the power and then double that for the company invoicing you now the gov say they can charge us for future power lines they want to build to supply power to the US.

Re:There's an obvious way to handle this

[shentino]

Who marked this flamebait?

With the exception of .gov, they should award contracts to the highest bidder to encourage competition.

As long as they have forfeiture clauses to use against miscreants who don't manage the TLD's correctly I would have no problem with it.

Having data properly transferred and signed by DNSSEC though would probably be an insurmountable hurdle.

So maybe a bad idea, but certainly not a dumb one. Using economics against a monopoly usually makes sense.

Re:There's an obvious way to handle this

[rlparker]

It seems to me the obvious problem with this would be that, in the end, it would likely spawn an escalation of registrations fees completely unrelated to inflation. Why not be the highest bidder, and just pass the cost on the the registrants? Bad plan!

Re:Should .com get special treatment?

[Drantin]

since when is .co.uk a TLD?