Judge dismisses registry change lawsuit.
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit Verisign filed against .XYZ and CentralNic.
Verisign sued the companies after two of Verisign’s clients sold their top level domain names to .XYZ and switched to CentralNic for registry services.
.XYZ acquired .Theatre, .Protection and .Security. The original applicants for these domain names had contracted with Verisign to run them. Once .XYZ bought the names; it wanted to move the names to CentralNic since the company already handles its other TLDs.
Verisign initially sued .Theatre applicant Key Brand Entertainment for the backend switch. Once it found out .XYZ and Negari, whom Verisign was already in a lawsuit with, were involved, it dropped that suit and sued XYZ and CentralNic instead.
The judge dismissed the suit against CentralNic for lack of jurisdiction. He dismissed the case against .XYZ because Verisign didn’t sufficiently allege a case of business conspiracy.
The judge’s decision is available here (pdf).
Verisign does a really good job of giving XYZ free publicity.
There are hundreds of new TLDs, but Verisign’s idiot legal department makes sure this one gets headlines week after week.
I wouldn’t call it free. They’ve spent over $1 million defending these suits. Of course, I guess they could ask for lawyers’ fees…
I am baffled why Verisign let this case go so far. I understand that they wanted to burn their competitors money. I also understand that they wanted to intimidate the industry. I also understand that they wanted to protect their brand. All very logical. All good business reasons for filing the suit.
But, this was a clearly weak case that they should have known at least by the end of discovery they were going to lose. Why not just drop it or settle? Why risk a judge coming out with a ruling like this? XYZ still would have burnt a bunch of money and everyone would have been intimidated.
Now every competitor knows with certainty that they can make all these kinds of statements against .com.
Was Verisign just being irrational? Dug themselves into a hole and too stubborn to reverse course? Bad legal advice?