ICANN wins a round in antitrust dispute

[dArKeR]

LOS ANGELES - The company that controls the directories for guiding Internet users worldwide failed to support its antitrust claims against a key oversight body, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz gave VeriSign Inc. until June 7 to bolster and refile its antitrust lawsuit against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization designed in 1998 by the U.S. government to oversee Internet domain names.

VeriSign controls the computers that contain the master list of domain name suffixes, such as ".com" and ".fr." The company also runs directories for the two most popular suffixes, ".com" and ".net"; those directories tell computers where to find specific sites like "Microsoft.com."

As a result, Internet computers intersect with VeriSign's more than 11 billion times daily to find out how to route e-mail and Web traffic.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5007128/