The Internet's biggest company, VeriSign, has come to agreement with Internet overseeing organisation ICANN after years of highly damaging legal battles.
You can read all about it on both ICANN's website and VeriSign's too.
Basically, VeriSign will finally accept that ICANN has authority over it – something that is long overdue and has had a damaging impact on the Internet in general. In return, ICANN has just given it the dotcom registry until 2012.
This is great news for everyone really. ICANN gets the authority it longs for; VeriSign gets to keep what it really wants – dotcom – and knew it would have to cede control of the root zone eventually; and the Internet itself benefits from two of its main players not fighting one another.
The deal still stinks though. I always suspected – in fact I wrote it publicly in an article – that ICANN and VeriSign did a deal back in 2004. VeriSign agreed to accept ICANN and give up its autonomy if ICANN promised to ensure VeriSign got both the dotcom and dotnet registries for at least another five years.
Unfortunately the dotnet contract mandated a selection process at the end of VeriSign's current term. The only solution for ICANN was to completely fudge this process in VeriSign's favour. Which is exactly what it did. And it would have got away with it too if the company that it choose to do the selection – Telcordia (which is appallingly closely affiliated to VeriSign) – hadn't made an absolutely terrible job of it.
I chased and chased this fudging process but it still made it through and VeriSign has dotnet until 2011.
I believe that those in a position to stop the process to a halt decided to take the wider view that, yes, the dotnet process (and even this arbitrary decision to extend the dotcom contract for seven years) was corrupt, but in order to bring an end to this fundamental crack at the top of the Internet, it was worth it. And, after all, VeriSign does a pretty good job.
We shall see what happens from here. It's put the Internet in a better position – but then I have an ideological hatred for dodgy deals, especially when the stakes are so high.
I've written a story for The Register about all this. You can read it here.
