VeriSign Submits Proposal to ICANN for .Net

VeriSign, Inc. (www.verisign.com), a provider of intelligent infrastructure services for Internet and telecommunications networks, today announced it has submitted a formal proposal to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to retain the administration and operation of the .net Top-Level Domain (TLD) . 

"We're very pleased to compete for the opportunity to continue administering, operating and securing one of the Internet's most vital pieces of infrastructure—the .net Top-Level Domain," said Mark McLaughlin, Senior Vice President and General Manager of VeriSign's Naming and Directory Services.

VeriSign's proposal is supported by an outstanding record of providing 100 percent availability of .net TLD resolution services and 100 percent zone file accuracy over the last seven years, as well as an investment of more than $150 million into building a world-class Internet infrastructure that reliably handles more than 4 billion .net Domain Name System (DNS) queries each day.

The .net TLD forms the critical backbone of the Internet's infrastructure for e-commerce and communications. In fact, .net supports more than $700 billion in annual e-commerce, 3 trillion annual page views, 300 billion annual e-mails, 58 percent of all Internet computer "hosts", and more than five million domain names.

"The average business owner and the average consumer have very little awareness of how critical .net is to the Internet's ability to function efficiently, but they would sorely miss .net if it were to go down for even a short period of time," said Stephen Borcich of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

VeriSign's proposal to retain administration and operation of the .net Registry is supported by Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, and MCI among other major companies.

ATLAS was named "one of the year's best innovations" by InfoWorld Magazine and was cited by ICANN Chairman Vint Cerf as an example of innovation in his evaluation of new generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs).