VeriSign Set to Control ".Com" domain until 2012

Earlier this year, VeriSign Inc. has won its bid to manage the .net registry, home to more than 5 million Internet domains, for the next five years.
The decision was expected after VeriSign got in March a tentative nod for the continued operation of the .net registry, which has provided VeriSign with about $26 million annually in revenue and has been doing this since 2001. VeriSign is also managing the .com domain.

As a settlement for dropping an antitrust lawsuit against ICAAN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), VeriSign announced a few days ago that it would maintain control of the ".com" Internet domain until 2012.
This settlement was reached at a time when ICANN is under attack from China, Iran and others that want more direct control over the domain-name system.

Now that the two involved organizations have patched things up, they will focus more on matters such as security and stability and the globalization of the Internet.

The reason behind this antitrust lawsuit was VeriSign introducing a search engine in September 2003 that directed Internet users who typed a non-existent domain name to a search engine that displayed advertisements.
A month later, ICANN ordered VeriSign to temporarily take down the service, after engineers said that it could interfere with the stability of the Internet.