alt Hacker NewsI really hope VeriSign will lose this battle, it will serve as a lesson to this awful company. VerSign is vampirizing the internet. They hold a very important power on the whole infrastructure and they are the opposite of a good steward. The third-level .name fiasco [1] in itself should have led the ICANN to stop working with VeriSign and give their TLD management to other actors, ideally non-profit structures. Instead of that the ICANN let them go with it based on the flat out lies VeriSign wrote in their request, and denied requests for reconsideration based on the same lies. So maybe this class-action in justice is the only way to get through to VeriShit.
> Instead of that the ICANN let them go with it based on the flat out lies VeriSign wrote in their request
Unfortunately, I’m not sure if there are actually any lies in their request <https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/consensus-policies/rsep-2...>.
To begin with, the form is really not well-applicable to such requests, but is nonetheless the process that gets used for such things.
Partly because of that, and partly because there are specific meanings of things in the field, there are various things that look like lies, but which aren’t actually. Saying “there will not be any effect on the life cycle of domain names” in §2.1, for example, is technically true: it doesn’t change the life cycle of domain-names-as-a-category, it just deletes a bunch of names (which you could describe as affecting their life cycles!) and removes a category of possible names from registration.
There are also things like §3.6, “Have you communicated with any of the entities whose products or services might be affected by the introduction of your proposed service?” where they just said “no”. (I think most people’s idea that there were lies springs from this section, and misunderstanding that the two sentences of the answer are responding to the two questions; they’re not saying that communicating with people is not applicable.) Irresponsible, and an obvious eyebrow-raiser, but presumably true. My biggest complaint on technicalities would be in §6.2 where they said they consulted with “a select group of registrars comprising a majority of the user base”… whereas I’d consider the registrants to be the user base, and they have said they didn’t consult with them.
§5.1 is perhaps the most ridiculous to me, though, when they say “yeah, our contract says we have to do third-level registrations, we’ll talk about removing that from the contract after discontinuing them”. Probably a part of the procedure, given how they word things, but ludicrous all the same.
They’re also definitely incapable of following instructions. In §5.1 when instructed to write “N/A” they wrote “Not applicable”, and in §7.3 when instructed to write “N/A.” they wrote “None.”