VeriSign today announced that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) renewed the company’s contract to serve as the authoritative registry operator for the .net registry for another six years.
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.
“As the demands on the Domain Name System grow to unprecedented levels, Verisign will continue to build and invest in the infrastructure that supports .net to ensure its continued secure and stable operation,” said Mark McLaughlin, Verisign’s president and CEO. “Verisign is proud to have been entrusted with this responsibility.”
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.