Tobias Wann of Verisign delivers a keynote session
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — One of the morning keynote sessions on Wednesday was delivered by Tobias Wann of Verisign, who offered an interesting look at Internet history, with “1985 to 2035, 50 years of the Internet.”
The significance of 1985 is that it is the year that the first .com domain was registered, making 2010 the 25th anniversary of that event.
The Internet, he says, is having a huge impact on things like media, book publishing, radio – making enormous changes to the way people consume those things, and to those industries. It is very obviously beginning to have that kind of impact on television.
Mobile phones are obviously a significant contributor to online content now, and are expected to overtake PCs as the main mode of connecting to the Internet within the next few years. A huge driver of that is that the lower-middle income level people in places like China and Africa have mobile phones but not computers.
All the Internet development, he says, needs infrastructure. And he says Verisign is “the leading provider” of Internet infrastructure. I guess it depends on how you define that, but obviously as the operator of .com and .net, it’s very broadly involved.
2011 is the beginning of a new chapter for Verisign, he says, mainly because last year the company sold its authentication (SSL) business to Symantic. Verisign is now strictly a registry operator.
He discussed what the company sees as the value in the domains it operates beyond .com and .net, like .tv, .name and .cc.
He says the company worked with eco Research to study the German registrar market, the results of which should be published at the end of the month.
A couple of hot trends for the domains business, he says, include DNSSEC – Verisign is going to sign the .com zone within the next few days. It did it with .net already, and it works.
If you take one thing away from the session, however, he says it should be to prepare yourself for the mobile boom. And Verisign has a new product called MobileView, which automatically creates and delivers mobile versions of websites – but that is apparently something that is going to be discussed in a different session.
The company also offers managed DNS and DDoS protection, products based around its performance as a registry operator.
Ultimately, he says, the Internet is the fastest developing medium we’ve ever seen, and it’s going to influence everything going forward.
Then he showed the trailer for the movie I, Robot, which takes place in 2035. It was pretty crazy.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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