Re: [ga] SSAC releases Wildcards report
Hugh Dierker wrote: You are making the assumption that the courts will see through Verisign's argument that they are providing a useful service for the public good as opposed to all the others who claim that "service" is harmful to the community, unwitting users, the DNS and all other businesses who reference the .com TLD and don't contract for SiteFinder advertising. And that doesn't account for those who had no intention of being tracked by a site they had no desire to visit in the first place or the other search engine providers who will be shut out by SiteFinder.I have given this some looking and have reviewed the recent Unocal case and it don't look to this old dog that the court up there in LA has original jurisdiction in this matter. It seems to this pair of eyes that all these problems and in fact the larger conspiracy is a matter of government contracting and community input. The amendments to the pleadings kinda lay this all out. I have heard tale of some jurists kind of forcing the hand of a recalcitrant and ignorant defendant, into making these arguments even though they was too blind or had too fancy of lawyers to do it in the first place. Verisign is a subcontractor of ICANN which operates under a contract, won in a competitive bidding process, with the DoC. The DoC has Jurisdiction along with the appropriate commission set to oversee such bad manners. Compliance is the rule here and the conspiracy fails because, just like electing a president, some conspiracies are legal. certainly the conspiracy of the community to stop wrong is protected. At this point it's a he said/she said confrontation. I keep wondering how a public comment period could work unless it was done by a non-participating entity asking how people feel about being automatically taken to an unrequested page without the capability of preventing it (average user) and being tracked at the same time. Users already have the Verisign spin. They need the opposing argument in order to make a determination on their own. If past court decisions are an indicator of how this might pan out, I'm not very encouraged. If any weight is given to the SSAC report, it would be slightly more encouraging. Leah |