VeriSign

VeriSign, Inc. is an American IT corporation that registers domain names, server systems and offers services to ensure security and counter cyber threats. VeriSign also supports two of the root DNS servers: A and J. The world's first company to start selling SSL digital certificates.

The company was founded in 1995, VeriSign is headquartered in Reston (Virginia, USA), with a staff of more than 1,100 people.

Performance indicators

2023: Revenue growth of 4.8% to $1.49 billion

Verisign, which manages the common top-level domains.COM and.NET, released its financial report for the 4th quarter of 2023 and the entire past year as a whole on February 12, 2024. It captures two seemingly contradictory tendencies. The number of domain names managed by Verisign is steadily decreasing, and revenues and net income are also steadily growing.

Revenues from the Chinese market fell by $14.4 million, but in general, the company's revenues amounted to $380 million in the 4th quarter of last year - 3% more than a year earlier. Net income also rose: from $179 million in Q4 2022 to $265 million in Q4 2023. In general, in 2023, Verisign's revenues amounted to $1.49 billion, an increase of 4.8%.

The contradiction between rising incomes and declining registrations is extremely simple. For three years in a row, Verisign has increased the price of registrations and their renewal in the.COM domain zone by 7%. The company's contract with the corporation ICANN includes the possibility of raising prices four times, and Verisogn has already officially confirmed that in 2024, from September 1, wholesale prices for registrars will rise again - from 9.59 to 10.26. dollar At the same time, the company's management is not inclined to see links between price increases and a decrease in the number of registered domain names.

History

2023: Gaining the right to manage the.WEB domain

Verisign will have the right to manage the.WEB domain. This was announced on May 4, 2023 by the Coordination Center for the National Domain of the Internet (CC).

In 2012, 7 applications were submitted for the.WEB domain, which was considered as the main potential competitor to the.COM domain. The fate of the domain was decided by an auction, which, unexpectedly for everyone, was won by the unknown company Nu Dot Co (NDC), which offered $135 million for the right to manage the domain zone.

Almost immediately it became known that NDC was funded by Verisign, to which the winner of the auction was inferior to the management of the.WEB domain. This caused a storm of indignation from the rest of the applicants. ICANN Corporation has tried to remove itself from the decision by shifting the burden of responsibility to US regulators. They did not see any violations, but Afilias (one of the applicants for.WEB) demanded an independent review of the auction results. The decision of the independent panel turned out to be rather in favor of Afilias: ICANN was required to compensate for all the costs of the proceedings (almost $1.2 million) and decide on its own whether the participation of the shell, in fact, the company in the auction of the corporation's rules and policies.

It took ICANN's board 16 months to finally articulate its position. But now it is known: the auction was held without any violations, and NDC has the right to dispose of the.WEB domain at its discretion - including transferring it to Verisign. Verisign officials have already said they fully approve of the ICANN board's decision. There were no comments from Afilas for May 2023.

2018: Publication of the Domain Name Industry Brief report

Verisign has published its next report Domain Name Industry Brief, the "National Internet Domain Coordination Center" reported on April 3, 2019. The document serves as one of the main sources of information on the state of affairs in the domain industry and sums up the results of 2018. As the report suggests, the Verisign-managed.COM shared top-level domain ended the year with 139 million registered names. Read more here.

2017: Verisign wants to use blockchain

Verisign, one of the oldest firms in the field, cyber security is exploring technology in the field. blockchain According to a patent application released by the Patent and Trademark USA Office on October 26, the firm is considering using blockchain technology as part of a new security expansion projectCybersecurity ^[1]

Project protocols are provided to protect users from accidental sending to malicious websites disguised as real ones. These protocols confirm that the website is official and exactly what the user needs to connect to.

Verisign has proposed a system that uses blockchain to store digital certificates, public keys or other authentication objects, Coindesk said. Also, the project protocol will use public and private keys as an additional security measure. The use of blockchain technology ensures that objects stored on PCs will be protected from hacking or malicious attacks.

However, the company has not yet announced plans to develop a new system.

Notes