VeriSign, ICANN Settle Dispute

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the US Dept. of Commerce backed overseer of the Internet has agreed to settle a lawsuit brought on by VeriSign, the governor of all things .com and .net, over ICANN's interference with VeriSign's controversial Site Finder. Under the agreement, VeriSign's contract to control the master lists of dot-com domain will be extended until 2012. VeriSign runs .net as well under a contract that ends in 2011. Site Finder was a service launched in 2003 to redirect web surfers who had misspelled web addresses to a list suggested matches rather than an error page. Critics complained this gave VeriSign an unfair advantage in search, especially since VeriSign sometimes accepted