It looks like Netflix isn’t the only company jacking up its rates this week. VeriSign, the Internet infrastructure giant that ICAAN recently awarded (via renewal) the contract to serve as the authoritative registry operator for the .net registry for another six years, said it would be raising the fees for its domain registration services.
Late in the day yesterday, the company announced, that effective January 15, 2012, it would increase registry domain name fees for .com and .net, per its agreements with ICANN.
The company said that that as of January 15, 2012, the registry fee for .com domain names will increase from $7.34 to $7.85 and that the registry fee for .net domain names will increase from $4.65 to $5.11.
“Continued strong global Internet usage growth, along with increasingly powerful distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks leveled against all parts of the Internet’s critical infrastructure, have dramatically increased the demands on Internet infrastructure providers such as VeriSign,” the company said in a statement.
The company said handled an average of 57 billion Domain Name System (DNS) queries on its infrastructure in the first quarter of 2011, and expects future growth to occur at an even faster pace.
VeriSign’s infrastructure has maintained 100 percent operational security, accuracy and stability for more than a decade, the company says.
More than half of the world’s domains rely on VeriSign’s infrastructure, and the company has held management of the .com/.net infrastructure for over 12 years. VeriSign also manages two of the world’s 13 Internet root servers, a.root-servers.net and j.root-servers.net, considered national IT assets by the U.S. Federal government.
In May 2010, VeriSign sold its identity and authentication business (Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificate Services, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Services, VeriSign Trust Services and VeriSign Identity Protection (VIP) Authentication Service) to Symantec for $1.28 Billion in cash.
