Reported by TheDomains and DomainNameWire:

Shares of Verisign(Domain Registry of .COM & .NET) ended trading on Friday at $54.85 are now trading at $49.17 after touch off of its intraday low of $48.55, namely shares of Verisign are now down over 10%.

Last Friday National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced its intent to relinquish control of the functions under the IANA contract. This includes managing the root zone, a role in which Verisign plays a part. But Verisign doesn’t get paid for playing its role in root zone management. While it was able to use its role with the root zone to apply a bit of pressure in the new TLD process, that didn’t amount to much.

Verisign’s contracts to run .com and .net domain names are not directly affected by the NTIA’s announcement. The U.S. government plays a role in the .com domain name contract, and some speculate it’s possible that the U.S. government could bow out of it connection to awarding the .com domain contract in the future.

Verisign issued a press release today saying that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) announcement of its intent to transition key Internet domain name functions would have no effect on .com or .net domain registry.

Re-edited by NiceNIC - ICANN & Verisign Accredited Registrar