Last year, Verisign unleashed upon the world the universally despised ‘Site Finder’ service, which changed the way DNS works so that any time you typed a domain name that didn’t exist, the DNS system would send your browser to a web page where Verisign would (mostly) try to sell you their overpriced services. This wreaked havoc with a lot of things, since it became harder to tell if a domain was real or not; you always got a response.
ICANN put a stop to the service, but now Verisign is suing ICANN in an effort to bring it back:
The suit, filed Thursday in the central district of California, said the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) unlawfully transformed itself over the last six years from a modest technical coordinating body into the “de facto regulator of the domain name system.”
So, apparently Verisign is claiming that ICANN is abusing its power by not allowing Verisign to abuse its power.
