(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- An appeals court has decided to revisit a December 2008 ruling regarding alleged antitrust violations as a result of VeriSign's (www.verisign.com) relationship with non-profit domain name system coordinator, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (www.icann.org), which could give it a monopoly on the .com registry.
According to a report filed by the Northern District of California district court, the Coalition for ICANN Transparency (www.cfit.info), an organization composed of website owners and other DNS participants, filed its complaint in 2005 against VeriSign, the sole operator of the ".com" and ".net" domain name registries in accordance with its contract with ICANN.
While the presence of only one operator for each domain name registry at any one time is not disputed, CFIT is concerned that the only viable competition can take place when obtaining a new contract after the expiration of the old one. The court found that there was no competitive bidding process surrounding VeriSign's .com agreement with ICANN in 2006.
VeriSign, which receives a fee for registering each domain name, was also allowed to increase the price of domain names by up to seven percent over four of the six following years. The .net agreement, which was awarded as a result of competitive bidding, contained price caps set to expire on December 31, 2006, leaving no limitation on the price that could be charged for .net names.
In the original case, CFIT sought to show that the prices were artificially high and that the renewal provisions wrongfully restrained competition for successor contracts. It also complained VeriSign's conduct in obtaining the anti-competitive provisions constituted monopolization or attempted monopolization of the .com and .net registration markets. It also sought an injunction against VeriSign's proposed service for registration of expiring domain names, on the ground it constituted an attempted monopolization of that allegedly separate market.
In its appeal, CFIT contends that the district court failed to appreciate the seriousness of the anti-competitive conduct allegations and that, by rejecting the existence of a separate, expiring domain name market, the district court "improperly relied on already outdated authority."
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