Well, Verisign has done it again. One of the bidders for the .net domain has gone on the record saying that there are factual issues in the published recommendation. The register, did some digging and found out that (surprise, surprise) there are serious conflicts of interest with several members of the evaluatory commitee. Pretty standard and transparent stuff, really. Evaluators with a monetary and/or personal interest in favoring their chosen pony and no compunction against slanting the evaluation criteria, ignoring technical experts, etc., etc. My question about this is, though: why is Verisign even allowed to bid?
Don't people remember that time that Verisign tried to hijack DNS to make money on all our collective typos? Remember when ICANN had to strongarm Verisign and threaten them publicly in order to make them comply? Paul Twomey (ICANN president) said in a statement:
"...VeriSign’s unilateral and unannounced changes to the operation of the .com and .net Top Level Domains are not consistent with material provisions of both agreements. These inconsistencies include violation of the Code of Conduct and equal access provisions, failure to comply with the obligation to act as a neutral registry service provider, failure to comply with the Registry Registrar Protocol, failure to comply with domain registration provisions, and provision of an unauthorized Registry Service. "
I mean, come on! Verisign sued ICANN for heaven's sake! The judge threw it out, and they upped the ante - swearing never to back down. We seem to forget this kind of stuff very quickly, but lest you forget, all this "evaluation," bidding, contracting, etc. is done using public funds. How come we get to foot the bill for continued poor service, continued leveraging of the public Internet to line Verisign's pockets?
Posted by Ed at March 31, 2005 12:36 PM