US Court of Appeals Reverses Verisign Motion – Lobbyists & Bloggers Paid To Attack?
June 10, 1 Comment - Author: Simon Johnson
An appeal from the US District Court was recently lodged in California. The Plaintiff is the Coalition for ICANN Transparency with the Defendant, Verisign, Inc.
Here is a small extract that I found interesting:
“CFIT alleged that in order to get ICANN to agree to the terms VeriSign desired, VeriSign paid lobbyists to support its position, “stacked” ICANN’s public meetings with VeriSign supporters, hired purportedly independent organizations and individuals to advocate VeriSign’s position, paid bloggers to attack ICANN’s reputation, planted news stories critical of ICANN in mainstream media, threatened ICANN with litigation, arbitration, and government investigation, and indeed eventually brought suit against ICANN in federal and state court.”
“CFIT alleged that ICANN and VeriSign conspired to set artificially high prices for VeriSign’s services and to ensure that VeriSign would receive successor contracts with ICANN without having to go through a competitive bidding process.”
Conclusion
“We REVERSE the district court’s grant of VeriSign’s motion to dismiss CFIT’s complaint for failure to state a claim, and REMAND to the district court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
Here is the original court document for your viewing pleasure.
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Facebook comments:
The same thing is going on in the domain aftermarket right now. There are lawyers, PR groups, and big businesses trolling to swing the market sentiment against domainers by posting ridiculous anti-domainer posts.
They’d like to paint all domainers as squatters so that it is easier to take domains in UDRP/Court and to create an atmostphere where legislation is easily accepted in regards to taking domains away from registrants. They want the big businesses to have more power than domain owners in any legal forum.