Iperdome Relinquishes Claims to .PER; To Seek Reparations from ICANN

ATLANTA, August 15, 2001 /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 email 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 world-wide process outlined by the U.S. government to resolve the dispute. For almost two years, Iperdome fully participated in the process that eventually lead 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 24th, 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.

###