eWeek reports this week about a lawsuit filed by a group of registrars on the so-called WLS or wait-listing service: after several claims by the plaintiffs were dismissed, the registrars decided to drop the case.

An earlier eWeek article goes into greater depth of what the service really means:

The service, first proposed in 2002, would allow those seeking a particular domain name to pay for the right to claim it in the event the current registration expires. Only one person could place a reservation on a given domain name.

The registrars filing the lawsuits claimed that WLS gives VeriSign, the authority over the net and com zones, the exclusive power to manage back-ordering of registered domain names, forcing consumers to pay for a domain name they may never get.

The debate on WLS is, really, more about money than about technical or even moral issues though: the registrars have, according to a plaintiff lawyer, “created their own competitive back-ordering services”.

VeriSign is often accused of abusing their position for commercial purposes; a year ago, they had to abandon their Site Finder ‘service’ (basically redirecting any nonexistent .com domain name to their website) after protests of the ICANN, the body that controls the . root domain name.