Meet Matt Larson, Part Three: VeriSign's role in the .com and .net root zones posted by Karen Snyder

Filed in: .net, com, dns, matt larson, root zone

Here is some more information from Matt Larson, VeriSign's DNS expert.

"VeriSign operates some of the most critical zones in the DNS. We operate the .com zone. that has approx. 80 million names, which makes it by far the largest zone in the Namespace by a factor of 7 or 8, so it's huge. One of our challenges is keeping that huge zone up and and shipping 80 million names around the world and keeping them up to date within a few seconds is a huge challenge for us. We also run the .net zone, which is much smaller than .com but is still a very large zone with 7 or 8 million names so it is also quite large."

"We also have a role in administering the root zone. The root zone is at the top of the name space, and it delegates to the vaious top level domain zones, or which there are approximately 280. People are most familiar with the "Generic Top Level Domain Names" like .com, .net, and .org. But every country in the world has it's own 'Country Code Top Level Domain' (or ccTLD.) So the root zone is relatively small, but it's extremely important because it's where you start when you want to look things up. We've been in partnership with ICANN, and Department of Commerce for many years to create the root zone, make changes happen, and publish it."

Want to hear more from Matt? Listen to his extremely informative (and rather entertaining) podcast "Ask Mr. DNS" that he records with his friend and co-DNS expert, Cricket Liu. You'll discover amazing things, like why Matt has 600 pipes in his living room (episode 2.)

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