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 June 8, 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 contracted registry operator for the country code top-level domains .cc (Cocos Islands) and .tv (Tuvalu). In addition, VeriSign is the primary technical subcontractor for the .edu, .name, and .jobs domains for their respective registry operators which are non-profit organizations; in this role they maintain the zone files for these particular domains and host the domains from their domain servers. Registry operators are often a "wholesale" role; there are many "retail" domain name registrars which actually sell .com and other domain names to consumers.

The authorities (such as ICANN) in charge of the various top level domains request changes to the root zone file which must be approved by the US Department of Commerce. If approved, the Commerce Department then instructs VeriSign to make the change. Changes to the root zone were originally distributed via the A root server, but now they are distributed to all 13 servers via a separate distribution system which VeriSign maintains. VeriSign operates two of the Internet's root nameservers, A and J. The other 11 are operated by various institutions and authorities. It is the only root server operator that runs more than one server. The J root is anycasted. The A root is located in their two primary data centers in Sterling, Virginia.

Source: Wikipedia > Verisign