Go Daddy Pursues VeriSign Damages
VeriSign agreed on Wednesday to obey a federal court order to stop sending out ``domain name expiration notices'' to customers of its rivals. Go Daddy sued VeriSign in U.S. District Court in the District of Arizona, seeking to force VeriSign to stop sending out the notices in an effort to get rivals' customers to unwittingly transfer their accounts.

Go Daddy charged that the notices amounted to false and deceptive advertising, interference with customer relationships, misappropriation of trade secrets and consumer fraud.

A Go Daddy spokeswoman said the suit would continue as Go Daddy seeks to recover damages.

A VeriSign spokesman said the company stopped the campaign in mid-May after a Maryland judge ordered the company to stop sending notices to customers of BulkRegister, a Baltimore registrar.

BulkRegister is also continuing its suit to win damages.

The letters sent out by VeriSign warn recipients that they could lose their domains if they do not send $29 to VeriSign. Customers who return the forms inadvertently switch their accounts to VeriSign, whose annual fee is much more than Go Daddy and many other registrars typically charge.

The campaign has also drawn complaints from a California law firm and the nonprofit California Consumer Action Network.

The Maryland injunction required VeriSign to stop sending the notices only to BulkRegister customers, but the Go Daddy suit forced VeriSign to discontinue the campaign completely.

VeriSign enjoyed a monopoly in the domain-name business through much of the 1990s, but the Mountain View, California company has been losing market share in recent years to sellers like Go Daddy which charge as little as $8.95 per year for the rights to a domain name like www.example.com.

``Either they're desperate to slow down the horrible attrition of domain name registrants to lesser-priced registrars, or they had a marketing person who made a bad decision,'' said Go Daddy general counsel Christine Jones, who said the smaller registrar's customers continued to receive the notices well into June.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-tech-domains-verisign.html