Who owns the World Wide Web?

Verisign, a corporation that started out small, has done a bit more than build hotels on Baltic and Mediterranean. According to a June 25 article in Fortune, it holds a remarkable near-monopoly on information flow. It operates behind the scenes and is well-known mostly to tech-savvy webheads, financial investors, and the federal Commerce Department.

In a vault with the security and austerity of nuclear missile silos, banks of computers handle data and transactions for Microsoft, Ford, GE, Texas Instruments, Bank of America, and First Union Bank. Each corporation has entrusted Verisign with the secret codes that allow the computers to sign and exchange documents with each other.

If you have ever checked into Web-based e-mail or purchased something online, you've probably seen Verisign's calling card: the small padlock that appears in the lower right corner of your browser, telling you your connection is secure. The icon is generated by their servers, where sophisticated software protects sensitive password and credit card information. In addition, those servers are where any online purchase is actually processed. Verisign handles about $2 billion in credit card transactions anually, and that's only one part of the S360 billion volume of overall Internet commerce.

The design and use of security is what got Verisign started in the Internet business. Competitors such as Entrust and Baltimore Technologies also had online-authentication software, but they chose to sell the program itself, whereas Verisign contracted itself as a service. Then, at the height of the tech-stock bubble, Verisign used its own stock to purchase Network Solutions, along with its government-sanctioned monopoly to manage any and all domain names ending in .net, org, and .com. Its servers handle 2 billion domain name searches daily.

For every server that runs credit card transactions, companies such as Amazon.com or CDNow.com pay $900. For every .net, .org, and .com address in its database-20 million coms alone, and thousands more per year-its government contract pays $6. The investments and cash-on-the-barrel-head it has on-hand could sustain profits and operations for two full years without taking on any new business.

Some people believe the amount of power Verisign wields is unsettling. In addition to hackers burning Verisign's CEO, Stratton Sclavos, in effigy, the Commerce Department recently renegotiated a deal where the company would give up the .net and .org databases. With seven brand-new domain names in development (including .biz, info, and .pro), Verisign will remain powerful if not dominant.