hutcheson - 6:01 pm on Oct 16, 2003 (gmt 0)

I think both are equally sleazy, and both are equally illegal. But the Verisign atrocity was more easily actionable for several reasons:

1) With IE, you have a choice. If you don't like the Infernal Exploder, download a real browser. Anyone can do this for cost-of-download-time. With V$, there is no choice. One of the most serious concerns ICANN had (from their point of view) was the destabilizing effect of attempts to avoid the V$ behavior in order to allow genuinely innovative tools for genuinely needed services (i.e. spam control, etc.) to be implemented.

2) M$, whatever its ethical failings, is technologically irrelevant at best, but is especially irrelevant to the internet. Nobody depends on them to do anything in particular. They are free to do whatever they think will make money. For all that they say about the internet being a focus of their business, and collecting a lot of money in it, they act at the outer fringes of the internet, with no functionality that couldn't be easily replaced by low-cost or no-cost software and/or garage-based local ISP's. If the good citizens of Redmond rose up, poured acid into all the server cabinets, and hanged every single M$ lawyer, PR flack, contract employee, and even the lone tech support person -- the internet wouldn't even blink. (The millenium might even be immanentized.) If V$'s servers were smashed by mobs of, say, Chinese workers angry at being served so much capitalist -imperialist propaganda in some foreign running-dog language, the internet would be seriously impacted within a matter of hours. Significant records involving (valuable) trademarked names would be lost and would have to be painfully reconstructed. Years of litigation would ensue (have already ensued) when they mess up a single name record. Which is why....

2) Aside from consent decrees, most of which M$ has so far been able to evade, M$ has nothing resembling a contract with the government. V$ is contractually obligated to provide certain services according to certain definitions. And ICANN can sue them or cancel their contract if they don't conform to the standards.