Such was not always the case, as opposition, sometimes fervent, was widespread within the domain business when the renegotiated contract between ICANN (icann.org) and VeriSign was first announced in late 2005.

With the deal finalized in November of 2006, however, and the 7 percent price increase announced and scheduled, VeriSign has begun to discuss its plans to spend the new funds on upgrading the infrastructure that supports the registries, and how its deal has become a template that ensures registries are able to live up to their considerable responsibilities.

Those responsibilities have increased significantly for VeriSign in the course of its operation of the .com and .net domains. While the company says it has operated both registries with 100 percent uptime since 1999, while seeing registry query volume increase from roughly 1 billion per day to more than 30 billion per day during that time. During the last several years, says the company, malicious attacks against the registry have increased 700 percent.

"We've always said," says VeriSign spokesman Tom Galvin, "is if the Internet went down, we'd have very different kinds of hearings, where we and the department of commerce and ICANN would be called up to explain how that happened. And that has a tendency to happen after the fact, [as in the case of hurricane] Katrina. There wasn't a lot of scrutiny on the levies in New Orleans prior to Katrina. But there is now. Our goal is to try to make sure that we have an infrastructure in place with the kind of systems and processes where you never have an Internet Katrina. You're never in a position where you have to explain, 'Well, why didn't you do more?'"

VeriSign's position is that the price increase will enable the registry to do more now. When you're dealing with a system that absolutely must be up 100 percent of the time, any significant threat to the security or capacity of the infrastructure can demand an upgrade.

"We always try to have ten times, or a higher number, above and beyond the capacity we need," says Galvin, "So you might say 'we have 100 times the capacity we need today,' and then, with one attack you see 50 percent of that go away. We still have enough to deal with double that size attack. But now you're not at double that, or triple that or at five times that. So what we continually have to do - and this ensures we have the resources to do that - is continually fortify and develop the Internet so that we can deal with the attacks and we can deal with the volume usage."

Galvin says the potential damage a DNS-level Internet outage could is almost incalculable, and could reach almost every business in the world.

"The people who operate the thousands of small businesses out there," he says, "the thousands of corporations, the thousands of Internet users who have Web sites up -- they all want to know that their Internet is going to work. That they're not going to go down. Millions of jobs are dependent on the Internet. Twenty-five percent of our economic value travels over the Internet every day. Livelihoods, from a small business perspective to large corporations, are based on the Internet working. And we're part of that solution to making sure it works."

VeriSign's enhancement plan goes by the name Project Titan, a program that by 2010 will see the company increase its capacity for DNS queries from 400 billion per day to 4 trillion per day. The company also intends to increase bandwidth capacity from 20 gigabits per second (Gbps) to more than 200 Gbps. The company will scale its infrastructure to include more than 100 regional Internet resolution sites, improving redundancy and reducing latency for the registries. Along with increased capacity, VeriSign is adding network operations centers to improve traffic management and developing new performance monitoring processes.

"We're going to continue to invest in the infrastructure," says Galvin, "continue to ensure that it has the sustainability, the redundancy and the latency to continue to operate in a strong way."

That investment, and defending against that Internet disaster, is at the foundation of VeriSign's deal with ICANN, and the reason that deal has become a template the organization is using in its contracts with the operators of registries for other top-level domains.

"I think the agreement as it was crafted," he says, "which ultimately became a template that they filed for us and they filed for Afilias and they filed for NeuStar and dot-mobi, was one that had three components to it. One, it held the registries accountable for their performance, so that we have to meet service level agreements. We have to keep the Internet operating at a really high level. Two, it gave those operators the ability to continue to invest in their infrastructure. And three, it gave consumers protection, because it ensured that there were limits on how much increases could go up."