DULLES, Va. — Verisign has withdrawn its request seeking the power to shut down non-legitimate websites, two days after submitting it to ICANN.
The plan caused an uproar among free speech and civil rights advocates who were concerned about too much government involvement on the Internet, DomainNameWire.com reported.
In the filing, Verisign said it wanted to set up a system that would “allow the denial, cancellation or transfer” of domain name registrations that comply with court orders and "laws, government rules or requirements, requests of law enforcement or other governmental quasi-governmental agency, or any dispute resolution process."
The proposed service would have called for VeriSign performing malware scans on all .com, .net, and .name domain names once a quarter. It would also have been able to suspend domain names that knowingly hosted malware.
