A federal judge Wednesday refused to grant a restraining order against AlterNIC's Eugene Kashpureff despite his suggestion that he agrees with Network Solutions Inc. that the domain guerrilla has interfered with the operation of its InterNIC domain-name registry.
"It is clear to me that irrevocable damage has been done, but your documents aren't specific enough as to what that damage is," said Judge Albert V. Bryan of the Eastern District Court of Virginia in Alexandria.
Network Solutions, of Herndon, Virginia, alleges that Kashpureff, owner of the private domain-name registry AlterNIC, has waged several attacks on its InterNIC system over the past few weeks. Network Solutions is sole caretaker of the generic top-level domains .com, .net, and .org - a situation Kashpureff calls a monopoly and has attempted to derail.
Kashpureff fooled most of the Net's nameservers into changing the identity of the www.netsol.com and www.internic.net machines to that of his own. Due to the distributed nature of the network, some servers may still resolve to AlterNIC, even though for Kashpureff, the jig is up.
"We are powerless to do something," John Christian Lowe of the Washington, DC, law firm Finnigan and Henderson, representing Network Solutions, told the court. "He [Kashpureff] is showing no respect for our company, for what he calls 'netizens' or people on the Internet, or for this court."
Network Solutions requested that the court set a US$10,000 bond and that a restraining order be granted immediately. But Bryan instead ordered the company to specify its grievances against Kashpureff and resubmit them to the court. Another hearing has been set for 1 August.
Kashpureff, who lives in Washington state, was not present at the hearing and has not retained an attorney, though Lowe said he notified the defendant of the actions being taken against him.
"This is a bit one-sided," Bryant said.
A less-than-chipper-sounding Kashpureff on Tuesday denied Network Solutions' allegations and said he had shut down his own service. "We do not intend to redirect the domain names of the InterNIC or of Network Solutions any longer and will promise the court not to do that, and hence they don't have any reason to take any immediate action against me."
"The part I really want you to know, and the part that I want you to care about," Kashpureff explained, is the contents of the 42-page civil action itself - which called for a complete seizure of all his computer equipment, including any data on magnetic storage.
"They're turning me into a child pornographer," he said. "Read just how bad they're trying to rape me and the public - there's some very inflammatory statements about .com, .net, and .org in this document itself."
While most network operators do not support Kashpureff's actions, his protest of the InterNIC monopoly strikes a common chord in many, including Aaron Abelard, who cites Network Solutions' unwillingness to work toward a compromise in allowing more top-level domains.
Karl Denninger, president of MCS Inc., which also provides alternative top-level domains, agrees. But he certainly doesn't agree with Kashpureff's tactics. "I do not support this kind of terrorism," he said. "This won't make me very popular with anyone over at the AlterNIC camp, but I hope he does go to jail."
