The new company received licenses to key cryptographic patents held by RSA (set to expire in 2000) and a time-limited non-compete agreement.

The new company served as a certificate authority (CA) and its initial mission was "providing trust for the Internet and Electronic Commerce through our Digital Authentication services and products".

In 2000, Verisign acquired Network Solutions for $21billion,[9] which operated the .com, .net and .org TLDs under agreements with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the United States Department of Commerce.

Those core registry functions formed the basis for Verisign's naming division, which by then had become the company's largest and most significant business unit.

[18] Verisign's share price tumbled in early 2014, hastened by the U.S. government's announcement that it would "relinquish oversight of the Internet's domain-naming system to a non-government entity".

The root servers form the top of the hierarchical Domain Name System that supports most modern Internet communication.

The A and J root servers are "anycasted” and are no longer operated from any of the company's own datacenters as a means to increase redundancy and availability and mitigate the threat of a single point of failure.

One at 22340 Dresden Street in Dulles, Virginia, not far from its corporate headquarters (within the large Broad Run Technology Park), one at 21 Boulden Circle in New Castle, Delaware, and a third in Fribourg, Switzerland.

In January 2001, Verisign mistakenly issued two Class 3 code signing certificates to an individual claiming to be an employee of Microsoft.

[citation needed] Microsoft had to later release a special security patch in order to revoke the certificates and mark them as being fraudulent.

They proposed Verisign continue to manage the .net DNS due to its critical importance as the domain underlying numerous "backbone" network services.

Verisign stated that the breach did not impact the Domain Name System (DNS) that they maintain, but would not provide details about the loss of data.

Verisign was widely criticized for not disclosing the breach earlier and apparently attempting to hide the news in an October 2011 SEC filing.

[32][33] Because of the lack of details provided by Verisign, it was not clear whether the breach impacted the certificate signing business, acquired by Symantec in late 2010.

[32] On November 29, 2010, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (U.S. ICE) issued seizure orders against 82 web sites with .com Internet addresses that were reported to be involved in the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit goods.

[35] InformationWeek reported that "Verisign will say only that it received sealed court orders directing certain actions to be taken with respect to specific domain names".

[36] The removal of the 82 websites was cited as an impetus for the launch of "the Dot-P2P Project"[37] in order to create a decentralized DNS service without centralized registry operators.

Following the disappearance of WikiLeaks during the following week[38] and its forced move to wikileaks.ch, a Swiss domain, the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned of the dangers of having key pieces of Internet infrastructure such as DNS name translation under corporate control.

In March 2012, Verisign shut down the sports-betting site Bodog.com after receiving a court order, even though the domain name was registered to a Canadian company.