MOUNTAIN VIEW, California: VeriSign Inc., major infrastructure and securities provider for the internet and which operates the registries for domain names ending in .com and .net, said it is increasing the domain name fees for these extensions from 15 October.

The company said it will charge $6.42 for .com domains and $3.85 for .net domains as registry fee. This will be the first revision in the fee ever since the fee structure was laid out by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 1999. The company said the increases are in terms of its agreement with ICANN. It currently charges $6 and $3.50 for the two domain name extensions.

VeriSign said since 1999, the volume of internet traffic and domain name queries on the company's global infrastructure rose from an average one billion queries per day in 2000 to 30 billion queries currently. The company also said traffic volume continues to increase as more and more consumer-driven services are introduced and with the proliferation of web-connected wireless devices. In addition, the company has also to tackle issues relating to security in the light of increased hacker attacks on infrastructures of these two domain extensions. It said the attacks have grown by 700 per cent.

The domain names are usually sold by brokers like Go Daddy on VeriSign's behalf and it collects the fees from these brokers.

VeriSign has recently launched an initiative called Project Titan to expand the capacity of its global internet infrastructure by 10 times by the year 2010. The company is expected to expand the capacity of its daily DNS query from 400 billion a day to over four trillion a day. It is also planning to increase the aggregate network bandwidth of its primary resolution centers around the world from the current 20 Gbps to 200 Gbps.

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