ATLANTA, Aug. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Iperdome, Inc.
today announced that it was relinquishing all claims to .per and that it would seek
reparations from ICANN.
Background:
Iperdome formed in January of 1997 to offer
Personal Domain Name services under the .per(SM) brand and TLD (Top Level Domain).
It was one of the first companies to offer:
* registrations
in a new TLD
* domain name branding services, including web
and e-mail
redirection services
*
discrete domain name assignments (a process that shares
common family names among millions of individuals)
After enjoying initial success,
Iperdome's business model became embroiled in the public debate surrounding Internet
governance. In an effort to "do the right thing," Iperdome agreed to support
the IFWP, a worldwide process outlined by the U.S. government to resolve the dispute.
For almost two years, Iperdome fully participated in the process that eventually
led to the formation of ICANN, the Internet's new governing body.
According to
the Commerce Department, ICANN was to be "a globally and
functionally representative
organization, operated on the basis of sound and transparent process that protects
against capture by self-interested factions,that provides robust professional management,
that is fair, open, and pro-competitive, and that will evolve to reflect changes
in the constituency of Internet stakeholders."
Experience has shown ICANN to be
anything but.
Instead of embracing all members of the Internet community, it instead
pursued
exclusionary tactics to marginalize and ignore all who differed with ICANN's pre-determined
solution. In response, Iperdome suspended operations on September 24, 1999,
after then ICANN president Mike Roberts publicly admitted the bias behind ICANN's
exclusionary actions.
Options:
For the last two years, Iperdome has explored
both public and private
legal actions, appealed to Congress, the Attorney General,
the Justice
Department, the GAO, the ACLU, several non-profit foundations, members
of the media, Washington lobbyists, venture capitalists, angels, several ICANN board
members, and explored legal actions by several Secretaries of State. The end result
of all of these inquiries, is that ICANN is fully insulated from legal challenges
and
immune from any actions Iperdome could possibly muster. And even if
Iperdome were to be awarded .per tomorrow, it would still have been irreparably harmed
by the continued delays and gaming by ICANN in
the name expansion process.
Conclusion:
What's
happened to Iperdome, and enabled the formation of a captured
version of Internet
governance, is "Predatory Capitalism" run amok. It's a system where the strong
and powerful use their money and influence, to squash weaker competitors. It's
a system where might is right, and how you play the game is not nearly as important
as winning.
It's a system that is at odds with the very nature of the Internet.
For this reason, Iperdome believes that ICANN will eventually be reformed to reflect
its founding principles as expressed by the U.S. Commerce department. And even though
this may take years or decades, when ICANN is finally reformed, Iperdome will seek
reparations directly from ICANN for the harm it has inflicted on Iperdome's investors.
MEDIA CONTACT: Jay Fenello, Fenello.com, 678-585-9765