ICANN and VeriSign to End Site Finder Suits

ICANN and Verisign have reached a tentative agreement to end their long-running legal dispute over how VeriSign resolves non-existent domain names.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names (ICANN) and registration services provider VeriSign have reached a tentative agreement to end their long-standing lawsuits against each other over how VeriSign resolves non-existent domain names for top-level domains it controls, like .com and .net. The agreement must still be approved by ICANN’s board after a period of public comment; you can see both ICANN’s and VeriSign’s announcements of the agreement at their sites.

The dispute dates back to late 2003, when VeriSign rolled out a new service called Site Finder which altered the way non-existent domains under VeriSign’s purview were resolved. When users typed in or clicked a link pointing to certain sites which didn’t exist