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Verisign v XYZ judge confirms both companies suck

Kevin Murphy, November 21, 2015, Domain Registries

Verisign and XYZ.com have both come out of a US lawsuit looking like scumbags.
Explaining his dismissal of Verisign’s false advertising lawsuit against .xyz registry XYZ.com, Virginia judge Claude Hilton today said that XYZ.com’s statements about its registration numbers were “verifiably true”.
At the same time, he confirmed that they came about as a result of a bullshit deal with Network Solutions to bolster .xyz’s launch numbers.
The judge’s ruling confirms for the first time the financial details of the deal between XYZ and Web.com (Network Solutions) that saw .xyz’s registration volume rocket in its first few weeks of general availability. He wrote:

Web.com purchased 375,000 domain names for a price of $8 each totaling $3 million dollars. In exchange, XYZ purchased advertising from Web.com in the form of 1,000 impressions for $10 each, at a total cost of $3 million dollars. Instead of cash exchanging hands, advertising credit was given to XYZ and the .xyz domain names were given to Web.com, who subsequently gave them away as free trials to their subscribers.

In other words, XYZ bought $10,000 of advertising for $3 million and paid for it with $3 million of free .xyz domains — 375,000 of them.
That bogus deal enabled XYZ to report big reg volume numbers without actually, legally, lying,
“The statements regarding Defendants’ revenue and number of registrations are statements of fact that are verifiably true,” the judge wrote.

When the Defendants [XYZ.com] stated they were a market leader in new TLD’s and that they had the most new registrations than any other TLD, they were basing that information off of an accurate zone file. Further, the zone file confirms that there are over 120 million .com registrations and one {1) million .xyz registrations. These statements are also true.

The judge said he was dismissing the suit not just because XYZ wasn’t lying, but also because Verisign couldn’t show that it had been harmed.
The number of .com registrations has actually been going up, he noted.
Much of Verisign’s complaint centered on this ad:

Verisign said the ad lied about the availability of .com domains, which XYZ denied.
The judge said:

The video posted to YouTube is puffery and opinion. It displays no actual domain names, and communicates a subjective measure of value and superiority, not capable of being proven false.

“Puffery” is a term with legal weight in false advertising cases under US law. It basically means that advertisers are allowed to exaggerate. XYZ had in fact used the “puffery” defense.
The judge seems to have relied heavily on zone file analysis to reach his conclusions. He wrote.

according to Plaintiff’s [Verisign’s] own data, .com names are largely unavailable. In a given month, Plaintiff reports that it receives about two (2) billion requests to register <.com> domain names, yet fewer than three (3) million are actually registered.

I believe that “two billion” number refers to how many “attempted adds” Verisign gets every month for .com domains, as reported in its monthly reports with ICANN.
That number would include every automated attempt to register a dropping domain by every registrar.
It’s not a reflection of how many actual human beings attempt and fail to register .com domains and, in my view, it’s worrying that the judge took it to mean that.
In summary, the lawsuit managed to unearth the dirty reality behind XYZ’s launch “success”, whilst also making Verisign look like a petty, petulant, child.
Everybody loses.
Except the lawyers, obviously, who have been paid millions.