Fergie's Tech Blog

The Register: ICANN skewed dot net process in favor of Verisign

Kieren McCarthy writes in The Register:

ICANN skewed the process to select a new owner for the .net registry in favour of incumbent owner VeriSign. Our in-depth investigation into the process, which has proved highly controversial since a final report gave the six-year contract to VeriSign, has revealed that ICANN:

• Unilaterally added judging criteria requested by VeriSign yet rejected during the official public process
• Unilaterally altered and downplayed explicit criteria, as repeatedly requested by VeriSign yet rejected during the official public process
• Did not add judging criteria detrimental to VeriSign despite clear, explicit and legitimate requests for them to do so
• Selected and publicly announced a known close associate to VeriSign to act as the process's evaluator without consulting the other bidders and despite their subsequent complaints
• Effectively ignored extensive complaints about competence and bias in the final report from all four losing bidders and two of its own constituencies

posted by Fergie @ 5/03/2005 09:37:00 AM