Shady Verisign Dealings

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