Domain registrars sue ICANN, VeriSign

One day after being sued by VeriSign Inc. over delays in approving a new service for back-ordering Internet domain names, the organization that controls the Internet's domain naming system is now being sued by a group of eight domain name registrars seeking to stop the new services' implementation, this time with VeriSign being named as a codefendant.

The lawsuit, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles, seeks to halt the implementation of a VeriSign-backed waiting list for expired domain names called Wait List Service (WLS).

The suit accuses VeriSign and ICANN, the nonprofit corporation responsible for allocating IP address space and managing top-level domains, of "planning to implement a scheme to dupe consumers into buying domain names the consumers will never be able to register, and an unlawful and fraudulent protection racket," according to court filings.

The battle is over how to re-register the 10,000 to 25,000 top level domains that become available each day after their owners fail to pay renewal fees, said Bill Mushkin, the chief executive officer of Name.com Inc., one of the registrars behind the lawsuit.

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