MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 6 (UPI) -- VeriSign Inc. will increase by 7 percent the fees it charges for Internet domains ending in .com and .net, the U.S. Web infrastructure firm said.
Starting Oct. 15, VeriSign's charge to domain registrars such as GoDaddy and TuCows, which typically handle customer domain registration, will rise to $6.42 from $6 for .com domains and to $3.85 from $3.50 for .net domains, it said in a statement.
"This will be the first registry fee increase for .com and .net since the fee structure was put in place by ICANN in 1999," VeriSign said.
ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, regulates Internet domain name and address registration.
VeriSign said the price increase was warranted because the volume of Internet traffic and domain-name system queries had risen significantly since 1999. It is now nearly 30 billion queries a day, up from 1 billion queries a day in 2000, VeriSign said.
In addition, the company has had to make investments to defend the .com and .net infrastructures against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, VeriSign said.
"Security exploits have grown by 700 percent since 2000 and are projected to increase by 50 percent in 2007 and 2008," VeriSign said.
