Re: [ga] lawyers

[Joop Teernstra <terastra@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 09:36 p.m. 6/01/2006, Karl Auerbach wrote:

> I agree, ICANN is ripe for being at the wrong end of legal actions 
> claiming that ICANN has unfairly and improperly acted as a combination for 
> the purpose of restraining trade, restricting the entry of vendors into 
> the marketplace, establishing minimum prices, and prohibiting new product 
> innovations.

What will make these legal actions hard is the reality is that behind 
ICANN's trade restrictive policies stands (hands-off, most of the time ) 
the government of a superpower at war.
Since your own small legal victory, many things have changed.




> There are several possible actions, each with its own class of plaintiffs 
> (I use the word "class" intentionally).
>
> The registrars form a class that can claim that they are unfairly deprived 
> of the ability to compete due to the imposition of cross-industry standard 
> terms and conditions as well as the imposition of arbitrary minimum 
> registry fees.
>
> The buyers of domain names form a much larger class that can claim that 
> they have had to suffer artifically imposed registry prices (that are 
> passed on via the registrars) and suffer industry-wide terms, such as the 
> privacy-busting whois and the trademark-uber-alles UDRP.  The damages in 
> this case could amount to billions of dollars - enough to attract the 
> Lerach kind of class action attorneys.

I do not think they would be so attracted to take on, indirectly, the DoC 
and the less visible and silent partners in the ICANN venture.

Legal action in the US becomes then an interesting exercise in assessing 
the independence of the judiciary.

Legal action elsewhere?  I cannot envisage a ,say, French judgement against 
ICANN being enforced in Marina del Rey. ;-)


-joop-