Beginning October 15, 2007, says VeriSign, registration fees for the .com domain will rise 42 cents per domain per year from $6 to $6.42, and fees for the .net domain will rise 35 cents from $3.50 to $3.85.

Both increases, the maximum amount allowed by the renegotiated registry agreement settled in November of 2006, will take effect following the six months of notice required by that agreement.

The fee increases will likely come as no surprise to registrars - many of whom opposed the ICANN deal when it was originally struck - as it was alluded to by CEO Stratton Sclavos during the company's first-quarter earnings report this week.

The deal, which renewed VeriSign's management of the .com domain until 2012 and .net until 2011, was criticized by many registrars for its length, and the control it granted the company over pricing. Also troubling to opponents was the fact that the deal was struck amid lawsuits going both ways, which were dropped when the new arrangement was struck.

Anticipating a certain amount of opposition, VeriSign points out that the fees increase is the first since 1999, and that since that time the company has operated the registry with 100 percent uptime.

Maintaining the infrastructure behind the domains, says VeriSign, requires ongoing upgrades to its systems - the number of DNS queries received in a day has increased from roughly 1 billion in 1999 to more than 30 billion per day currently.

Some registrars will undoubtedly object to the increase, as it could have a considerable impact on the bottom line of companies who sell .com or .net domains for a very thin margin, and sometimes at a loss. Go Daddy (godaddy.com), for instance, sells .com domains for $1.99 per year with the purchase of another service such as Web hosting, while 1&1 Internet (1and1.com) currently sells .com domains for $5.99.

VeriSign says that according to its own research, the average per-year retail price for .com domains among the top 10 registrars is $20.24, and $20.25 for .net domains. At these prices, says the company, it is unlikely that registries would pass the increase on to customers, or that the increase would substantially affect a purchasing decision.

To address the increasing volume of both DNS queries and cyber attacks, VeriSign recently announced Project Titan, an initiative to expand the capacity of its global Internet infrastructure by ten times by the year 2010. The company says it will increase its DNS capacity from 400 billion queries a day to more than 4 trillion, and increase its network capacity from more than 20 Gbps to more than 200 Gbps.