VeriSign, Inc. (www.verisign.com), a leading provider of intelligent infrastructure services for Internet and telecommunications networks, announced on January 19 that it has submitted a formal proposal to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (www.icann.org) to retain the administration and operation of the .net Top-Level Domain (TLD). 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.
VeriSign's proposal to retain administration and operation of the .net Registry is supported by Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and MCI, among other major companies. Over the past five years, VeriSign has developed and deployed a DNS system called the Advanced Transaction Lookup and Signaling System (ATLAS) that supports the operation of .net and maintains multiple Internet protocols, while capable of processing many billions of Internet queries per day without going down. 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).
