According to a Press Release by Manwin Licensing International, they filed an amended complaint in its lawsuit for antitrust violations against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and ICM Registry (ICM).
In the PR Manwin says that the amended complaint drops two related state law claims against ICM and ICANN.
“While Manwin believes that it would have prevailed on the two state law claims, those claims involved procedural peculiarities of California law that posed risks of potential trial delay. Manwin is anxious to have its day in court and did not want any such delay.”
“The filing of an amended complaint in our antitrust case was required to avoid unnecessary procedural delays by ICM and ICANN,” said Kevin E. Gaut, counsel for Manwin and partner with Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp LLP. “It also reinforces the fact that both ICANN and ICM both knew that the terms of the .XXX registry contract would permit ICM to charge supra-competitive prices and prevent competitors from entering the market. We are still pursuing all of the remedies filed in the original complaint.”
The last sentence of the PR certainly doesn’t match the the sentiment in Manwin’s Court filings on Valentines Day that expressed that settlement talks were underway and that “” The parties believe that additional time would potentially allow the parties to resolve all or some portion of their dispute”
Manwin Licensing International operates many highly visited adult sites including YouPorn.com
As always we will keep you updated.
Thanks Berkens for this update.
I hope Manwin wipes them off the face of the Internet. ICM has to be gushing blood. How much longer can they go? They aren’t selling domains like they were when they started. Hell, .Tel is selling more domains a day than .xxx is.
Adult
For the record I still think the suit has no merit and will not succeed.
You can read my thoughts on the merits of the case
Here
http://www.thedomains.com/2011/11/16/owners-of-youporn-com-digitalplayground-com-sues-icm-icann-for-anti-trust-over-xxx/
and here
http://www.thedomains.com/2011/11/18/my-first-post-on-circleid-com-is-up/
for starters
The US government gave ICANN the right to govern the domain name system.
ICANN entered into a contract with ICM.
All contracts entered into by ICANN with an operator of an extension are monopolistic by definition, so if ICANN had no right to enter into a contract with ICM to operate .XXX they had no right to enter into a contract with Verisign to operate .com
Please let it go to discovery, please let it go to discovery…..
Having ICANN staff and Board members answer questions under oath = priceless. 🙂
this lawsuit. it’s a loser. but… george raises a point.
discovery might reveal some things about how icann’s dns operation works to a new audience.
things that the public does not realise, but which more folks may be getting more curious about (and rightly so), other than george k. and some otherwise well-meaning nerds who are reasonably informed but just stand by year after year and do nothing.
and putting these facts out there could provide the basis for another suit.
a suit that is not a loser and is based on sound theories and claims that will easily withstand any motion to dismiss.
the reason this suit is a loser is because the client and her lawyers do not understand dns well enough. it’s hard to draft solid claims when you don’t really understand what it is the defendant does, i.e., you lack the needed facts.
not to mention these plaintiffs are porn peddlers.
to succeed with meritless lawsuits having to do with the internet, you need to be in the right business: e.g., software, hardware, music or non-adult films.
maybe we need to set up a special tribunal: “the international internet porn court”. it would be a cash cow. and quite entertaining.
“Having ICANN staff and Board members answer questions under oath = priceless. :)”
…which occurred extensively during the arbitration between ICM and ICANN already.
@Berkens I understand your points. But do you really think this lawsuit is about the, “good of the Internet?”
Watching a huge company like Manwin make ICM bleed out everything they made from defensive regs in legal fees is good enough for me. They brought this on themselves with their fear campaign and I don’t see anyone feeling sorry for them.
@Kirikos
🙂
The problem is the general public doesn’t have any idea what ICANN is about to unleash on the world. Most of the people I talk to don’t even know there is any such thing as ICANN, let alone what they do.
Adult
99.999 of businesses operating on the Internet are doing so to make a profit not to do good.
Even Google
@Berkens
I don’t see where making a profit is a bad thing, or “not good”.
It’s how you run your business and most don’t do it by instilling fear every time they get a chance to force the consumer to buy their product. There is a difference. You don’t agree?
I don’t see IKEA telling me I better buy their stuff “or else!”
Adult
Yes I have written about that “sales strategy” of ICM which I disagree with as well
http://www.thedomains.com/2011/12/08/its-time-for-icm-registrars-to-start-selling-xxx-on-its-merits-rather-than-for-protection/
@Berkens
Yes, and has it changed? Even in their last pr blast they are still using fear as motivation to buy their product.
http://www.thedomains.com/2012/02/21/icm-name-com-announce-details-of-adult-performer-program-3500-xxx-domain-names/
Making a profit is one thing, and there is nothing wrong with it. What ICM does to make their profit is unacceptable. Period. I wouldn’t even try to compare a company selling their goods to make a profit to what they do to make theirs. And they still continue to do it.
Why they do it is obvious. It’s the only card they have.
Well my understanding of that program is you get a .XXX domain for free for a year if you qualify.
You can then decide to keep it and pay registration fees which I see are around $79 now or give it up.
I don’t see the same sell by fear message in that message.
How is .com a monopoly when everyone has the freedom to operate on a .net, .mobi, .org, .biz, ect? ICANN granted only one sex tld which is .XXX, to legitimize pornography, operated by one company, with no plans for another sex tld to compete. Makes sense the other smut barons are angry about this. With fearing .XXX lobbying efforts down the road for mandating its use. Which of course would be the clearest case of a monopoly.
However, the main problem with .XXX is that companies not involved in the sex trade are being scared to believe if they dont buy a .XXX domain, their businesses will be ruined. In fact its turning out most of the pornographers themselves arent even buying .XXX domains, with alot of revenue coming from non porngraphic defensive registrations. And thats WRONG.
Congress needs to step in and investigate .XXX and ICANN. They are both out of control.
it’s not a monopoly in fact. it effectively operates as one, mainly due to consumer ignorance and software authors who choose to tie icann’s root servers into their dns software by setting them as the defaults.
defaults can be overidden manually, but again ignorance and apathy make such changes rare.
C2
Its a legal monopoly
That is what a TLD confers on the registry that is why is so valuable and that is why many company’s are applying to be one.
http://www.thedomains.com/2011/11/18/my-first-post-on-circleid-com-is-up/
is an icann tld the sole source of domain names?
only if you set your system to use dns servers in the icann tld system and refrain from creating domain names yourself or using names created by anyone other than an icann tld. essentially you have to deliberately limit yourself. consumers do this out of ignrance.
are there barriers to entry into the “business” of selling entries in a zone file and providing access to authoritative dns servers?
only the knowledge of how to do that.
i understand your point, tld’s can make great returns.
but this is because of consumer ignorance and the mindshare they’ve gained amongst the internet community, not barriers to competition.
running an icann approved tld may be “a license to print money” but it does not constitute a monopoly. and as such, this lawsuit will be never go to trial.
C2
ICANN is the sole source of issuing TLD that work across all networks as we sit today
There are Alt DNS systems and have been for years but its going to exclude 99.99999% of the population as we sit today
@ Mark Wendel
And how many of “job” , “Telecommunication” , “Aviation ” and “Travel ” TLDs did ICANN grant?!
@Mark Wendel
“ICANN granted only one sex tld which is .XXX, to legitimize pornography, operated by one company, with no plans for another sex tld to compete”
And how many of “job” , “Telecommunication” , “Aviation ” and “Travel ” TLDs did ICANN grant?!
Ben
There are 22 TLD approved to date by ICANN
There maybe 500+ within 2 years
Michael
True, but I think most of those 500 TLDs will be mainly brand names; eg .Pepsi, .CocaCola, .Apple..etc , few industry related TLDs such as .beauty…etc
and company names like .Manwin ( but that one will become .ManLose by then I am afraid 🙂
I think ICANN is doing fair business when they give each industry its TLD , they are creating equal oppotunities for all.
Personally, the term “alternative DNS” makes no sense to me. I know what happened with the so-called alt roots. That was a different time. But DNS is DNS. There is no “one true DNS”. The internet is not a telephone network controlled by a telephone company that provides reliable directory service, exclusively. It’s a haphazard throw-together of myriad disparate networks, a hack. No one owns it. And no one controls it.
Some Stanford graduate students copy millions of webpages without authorisation by making millions of automated queries. They create a database and a “search engine” is born.
A Harvard undergraduate gains unauthorised access to thousands of the univeristy’s online photo profiles of his fellow students, makes automated queries to copy them, then uses this bounty to create a database. He makes it available via his own website and sends unsolicited emails to the students, using the addresses in their profiles, to let them know their photos are now online for anyone to see. A “social network” is born.
Each becomes a company that then prohibits anyone else from making automated queries against their databases.
Barriers to entry?
Sole source?
No, they just took the initiative and were lucky enough to become popular.
A DNS is merely a directory of names and numbers and a method of serving it via computer. Anyone can create their own directory of names and numbers. Businesses do it for their internal networks. Network savvy home users do it for their home networks.
Telephone companies would no doubt like to be the sole source of telephone number information. And they have tried to prevent others from copying the phonebook. Mostly they have been unsuccessful. In the US, you have the Feist decision.
If you want something to “work across all networks”, then all networks have to cooperate to some degree. Looking at the internet, is cooperation achieved by a “top-down” mechanism or is it somethng that happens from the “bottom-up”? I submit that no one controls the internet, though many would like to.
DNS works “across all networks” because, over time, “all networks”, on their own initiative, adopted a common protocol, IP. That any given DNS works across many networks has nothing to do with who is running it.
Anyone can run a DNS. And indeed others ran the one ICANN is now running before ICANN took it over.
Any DNS will “work across all networks” because all networks are IP-enabled.
Not to suggest anything will change. There has to be an impetus.
But there is nothing to stop competition in DNS except lack of know-how or desire to compete. And that’s why this allegation of antitrust is not going to succeed.
@c2
innteresting points.
*interesting
Check out the news today over on the EFF site regarding the time zone database.
“Facts are not copyrightable.” The lawsuit was filed based on a “fundamental misunderstanding of the law.”
Gosh, that never happens with companies doing business on the internet.
So whose misundertanding was it?
The client?
His lawyer who agreed to accept payment for filing an action based a meritless claim?
Both?
“ICANN is doing fair business when they give each industry its TLD , they are creating equal oppotunities for all.”
Ben, But there is no requirement for TLD operators to make domains publicly available. Some may keep all/the best domains for themselves, others may grant to favored clients. If there’s a legal monopoly then mandating fair pricing and equitable release of domains might not have been a bad idea.
Difference between Verisign and some new TLD operators is that they’ll be more actively exploiting their monopoly, by for example bundling services with domains.
This blog content is very good thanks.
N
“”But there is no requirement for TLD operators to make domains publicly available. Some may keep all/the best domains for themselves, others may grant to favored clients. “”
Yes or sell them for premium dollars
New gTLD’s=High risk high reward
n
You have a valid point there. But they (TLD Applicants) have their valid point too!They believe they were the ones who did all the hard work and the risk from the beginning ;from being the first to file the application to getting the TLD live and kicking so they actually believe they “invented” the product and believed in it, and they have the right to implement their own business and marketing strategy like every company .As Michael said ;”New gTLD’s=High risk high reward”