Verisign

About Verisign

Verisign Inc. is an American company based in Reston, Virginia, the United States that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the .com, .net, and .name generic top-level domains and the .cc and .tv country-code top-level domains, and the back-end systems for the .jobs, .gov, and .edu top-level domains. Verisign also offers a range of security services, including managed DNS, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack mitigation and cyber-threat reporting.

About this recipe

Verisign's core business is its naming services division. The division operates the authoritative domain name registries for two of the Internet's most important top-level domains, .com and .net. It is also the contracted registry operator for the .name and .gov top-level domains as well as the country code top-level domains .cc (Cocos Islands) and .tv (Tuvalu). In addition, Verisign is the primary technical subcontractor for the .edu, and .jobs top-level domains for their respective registry operators, which are non-profit organizations; in this role Verisign maintains the zone files for these particular domains and hosts the domains from their domain servers. Registry operators are the "wholesalers" of Internet domain names, while domain name registrars act as the “retailers”, working directly with consumers to register a domain name address.

Verisign also operates two of the Internet's thirteen "root servers" which are identified by the letters A-M (Verisign operates the “A” and “J” root servers). The root servers form the top of the hierarchical Domain Name System that supports most modern Internet communication. Verisign also generates the globally recognized root zone file and is also responsible for processing changes to that file once they are ordered by ICANN via IANA and approved by the U.S. Department of Commerce.