June 21, 2002 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Following an initial victory this week in its lawsuit against the much larger VeriSign, domain name registrar Go Daddy Software (godaddy.com) said it hoped for a speedy resolution to what could potentially be a very lengthy proceeding.

Go Daddy said on Thursday that it reached its initial goal with the lawsuit when an Arizona Federal Judge entered a stipulated order prohibiting VeriSign from a continuing a questionable marketing campaign, which involved sending misleading ?domain name expiration notices,? which, once returned, would transfer management of a domain to VeriSign, to the customers of competitors.

VeriSign had already been to court over the campaign, with registrar BulkRegister. In May, BulkRegister won a preliminary injunction against VeriSign, stopping the company from contacting BulkRegister customers.

The order entered Thursday is significantly broader. The stipulation negotiated by Go Daddy and VeriSign prohibits VeriSign from sending the notices to the customers of any registrar.

"It seemed like a waste of everybody's time, and a waste of judicial resources," says Go Daddy general counsel Christine Jones, "to have to have every single registrar around the country go into their own local court and have a similar order entered when the precedent had already been set, and the decision had already been made that it?s more likely than not a jury is going to find this thing to be deceptive."

Following the stipulated order, however, Go Daddy will proceed with the lawsuit as planned, beginning now with the discovery phase. The company is seeking damages for monetary losses the company suffered as a result of the campaign, as well as compensation for the customers who unwittingly transferred their domains to VeriSign.

"We had hundreds and hundreds of customers who signed that form and sent it back in, not understanding what it was," says Jones. "With many of those people we were able to stop the transfers in the process by literally getting on the phone and calling every single person and asking them if they understood the significance of that notice and if, in fact, transferring was what they wanted to do."

While Go Daddy is seeking damages on behalf of its customers who lost money, Jones says the company won?t require them to get involved in the lawsuit.

"We're the plaintif in this case," says Jones, "and there are a couple of class actions that have been put together to represent the consumers. We're hoping, as a result of our lawsuit, that we can get the customers back into the position that they would have been without this misleading notice."

And, though the stipulated order was quickly accomplished, says Jones, the rest of the lawsuit could take significantly longer to play out. "We could conceivably be in litigation on this case for a year or two," she says, "although we're going to press for a much speedier resolution than that."