Verisign

ICANN approved .name in its first round of generic top-level domains in 2000. At first only third-level names were sold: the registry registered each surname at the second level to itself and controlled its DNS, while individuals registered addresses such as kevin.murphy.name beneath it.⁠[1]

The domain launched in 2001 under Global Name Registry, and second-level .name registrations have been available since 2004.⁠[2]

On October 1, 2008, Verisign acquired The Global Name Registry Ltd., the operator of the .name registry.⁠[3]

Verisign sold its Authentication Services business to Symantec; the sale closed on August 9, 2010.⁠[3]

In 2011 Verisign completed a four-year restructuring, and in the third quarter the board appointed D. James Bidzos as president and chief executive officer.⁠[3]

As of its 2016 annual report, Verisign was the exclusive registry for .com, .net and .name. The current term of the .name registry agreement ran to August 15, 2018, and prices for .net and .name registrations could rise by up to 10% a year.⁠[4]

Verisign began declaring quarterly dividends in the second quarter of 2025 and had 928 employees at the end of that year.⁠[5]

On April 15, 2026, Verisign filed a Registry Services Evaluation Policy (RSEP) request with ICANN to stop third-level .name registrations and delete existing ones on the grounds of “declining usage and limited registrar support of the service.”⁠[6]

Verisign also planned to close the .name email forwarding service; the affected second-level names would become available for registration after one year.⁠[1]

ICANN approved the request on May 7, 2026, finding that it raised no significant security, stability or competition issues. In a July 28 letter it informed Verisign that it was “free to discontinue” the service, provided that registrars received at least 90 days’ notice. Verisign said most of the roughly 22,000 existing third-level registrations were not in use.⁠[7]

In June 2026 Doytchin Spiridonov of the Bulgarian registrar Dom.bg filed Reconsideration Request 26-2 with ICANN, asking it to reverse the approval; the reconsideration process does not pause the deletion.⁠[8]

Using the zone file, he counted 22,288 affected domains and argued that the statement in Verisign’s request that “There will not be any effect on the life cycle of domain names” was untrue.⁠[9]

On August 24, 2026, ICANN’s Board Accountability Mechanisms Committee (BAMC) recommended that the Board deny Request 26-2 and gave the requester 15 days to submit a rebuttal.⁠[10]

A registrant who had registered his third-level name nearly 25 years earlier said his registrar had informed him that the name, paid through 2040, would be terminated in February, costing him both his website and his email address.⁠[11]

Critics warned that once third-level records are deleted, the parent second-level names could be registered by others and used to intercept communications and reset passwords.⁠[2]

On September 29 Spiridonov submitted that Tucows sponsored 12,955 of the remaining registrations (59.23%), that its OpenSRS service had ended support on June 19, and that he had contacted about twenty major registrars without finding one able to accept transfers.⁠[12]

On October 6 an affected registrant, counting from the September 30 zone file, put the third-level delegations to be ended at 20,710, plus 14,906 forwarding-only second-level names; Requests 26-5, 26-6 and 26-7 concern the same ICANN action.⁠[13]

Verisign’s third-quarter revenue was $443 million, up 5.7% year over year, and its net income was $212.6 million. The .com and .net domain name base stood at 182.5 million on September 30, up 6.1%. The company said the rollout of the .web top-level domain was “on track.”⁠[14]

Verisign operates two of the 13 global internet root servers, provides registration services and authoritative resolution for .com and .net, and performs the Root Zone Maintainer function under an agreement with ICANN.⁠[5]