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September 23, 2003 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Go Daddy Software Inc. (godaddy.com) said yesterday it has filed a lawsuit against VeriSign Inc. (verisign.com) in federal district court in Arizona, seeking a temporary restraining order against VeriSign?s Site Finder service, released last week.
The VeriSign "wildcard" service redirects traffic that would otherwise have resulted in a "no domain" response to a VeriSign-operated Web site with search results and links to paid advertisements supplied by VeriSign. According to VeriSign, Site Finder has been visited over 65 million times by Internet users as of September 22, averaging more than 5 million unique visitors per day.
Critics have said that the service gives a private company too much control over online commerce and lets it profit from an essential monopoly over ".com" and ".net" names.
Go Daddy said in a release that the lawsuit complains VeriSign is misusing its position as the .com and .net domain registry to gain an unfair competitive advantage by intercepting (and profiting) from Internet traffic resulting from the significant number of domain names that are mistyped in a user?s browser every day - a number that can reach 20 million in a single day.
"VeriSign has hijacked this entire process," said Bob Parsons, president of Go Daddy. "When the user is sent to VeriSign?s advertising page, VeriSign gets paid by the advertiser when the user clicks a link to get off the page ? to the tune of $150 million annually, as estimated by VeriSign."
Parsons said that VeriSign?s wildcard service also hijacks traffic from domain names that do not exist.
"It?s important to understand that VeriSign?s charter to act as the .com and .net registry was never intended to let them manipulate the domain name routing system for their own profit," said Parsons. "This misuse certainly violates the fiduciary responsibility placed upon VeriSign by Congress to manage the .com and .net registries for the public good. Site Finder is being introduced by VeriSign solely for VeriSign?s own profit without regard for the hardships it places upon others. Site Finder will set a dangerous precedent if it is not stopped."
ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, called upon VeriSign on Friday to voluntarily suspend the wildcard service until the various reviews underway are completed.
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Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
October 2009 - Web Hosting's All Star Team
This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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