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MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA - VeriSign, Inc. (Nasdaq: VRSN), the leading provider of critical infrastructure services for the Internet and telecommunications networks, today announced that it has filed a lawsuit in Federal Court in the Central District of California against the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

The suit alleges that ICANN overstepped its contractual authority and improperly attempted to regulate VeriSign's business in violation of its charter and its agreements with VeriSign. By straying from its charter and agreement to be a technical coordination body, VeriSign asserts that ICANN has improperly attempted to become the de facto regulator of the domain name system and in doing so stifled the introduction of new services that benefit Internet users and promote the growth of the Internet.

VeriSign has attempted to work with ICANN within an agreed upon framework to introduce new services, including recent discussions regarding the Wait Listing Service, which enables users to pre-register for a domain name. Over the last several years, ICANN has failed to follow a clear, consistent and uniform process.

"The framework embodied in our contractual agreements with ICANN strikes a careful balance between the need to give ICANN the authority it needs to perform its technical functions and the need to preserve a registry's flexibility to innovate and introduce new services. ICANN has upset that balance by making assertions of control over services and by administering its authority inconsistently and unfairly," said Tom Galvin, vice president of VeriSign Government Relations.

"An effective, credible ICANN is a positive thing for the Internet community. We fully support a global framework for the coordination of the domain name system. This effort is about gaining clarity around ICANN's role with the hope of establishing an effective and credible structure for Internet governance. That structure will help promote innovation and new services that benefit millions of Internet users," said Galvin.