Verisign, Verisign

The new company received licenses to key cryptographic patents held by RSA and a time limited non-compete agreement. The new company served as a certificate authority (CA) — a role it still fulfills — and its initial mission was "providing trust for the Internet and Electronic Commerce through our Digital Authentication services and products." VeriSign now has more than 3,000,000 certificates in operation for everything from military to financial services and retail applications, making it the largest CA behind the encryption and authentication on the Internet, which most people recognize as the small padlock icon in their Web browser when shopping online. VeriSign is well known for the VeriSign Secured Seal, which is an outward expression of a Web site's authentication and encryption commonly posted to VeriSign SSL Certificate customers' Web sites.

They proposed VeriSign continue to manage the .net DNS due to its critical importance as the domain underlying numerous "backbone" network services. On the 8th of June 2005 ICANN announced that VeriSign had been approved to operate .net until 2011. More information on the .net bidding process is available here.

It is also the authoritative registry operator for the country code top-level domains .cc (Cocos Islands) and .tv (Tuvalu). In addition, VeriSign runs the DNS servers for .edu, .name, and .jobs for their respective registry operators which are non-profit organizations, however they do not have any say in the operation of these domains. Registry operators are often a "wholesale" role; there are many "retail" domain name registrars which actually sell .com and other domain names to consumers.

Source: Wikipedia > Verisign