ICANN said Monday it has settled a long-running legal dispute with VeriSign Inc. (Photo: www.a1sbs.com)

    BEIJING, Oct. 26 -- Internet overseeing organisation ICANN said Monday it has settled a long-running legal dispute with VeriSign Inc., a security and services firm that controls the .com and .net network domains.

    VeriSign introduced a controversial search service called Sitefinder in late 2003, redirecting Internet Web surfers who mistyped Web addresses to sites controlled by VeriSign.

    Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN ordered VeriSign to temporarily shut down the service a month later on the grounds that it interfered with spam filters and gave VeriSign an unfair business advantage because of its role as an operator of several of the Internet's root domain name servers.

    VeriSign sued Icann in federal court in February 2004, charging it with illegally restraining competition.

    The lawsuit was thrown out of U.S. court in August 2004, but VeriSign refiled in California state court.

    Under the terms of the settlement announced Monday, Icann agreed to put in place a process for offering new services. VeriSign's gets to maintain control of the database of 35 million ".com" domain names until 2012.

    VeriSign makes $6 per year from each of the 35 million .com domain names in use. It also controls the .net domain, which contains nearly 6 million names.

    The Internet technical community has begun the development of a security enhancement to the current Internet infrastructure, known as the Domain Name System Security Extensions. Widespread use of these protocols could significantly reduce fraud and other crimes that currently plague the global network. Enditem

(Agencies)