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VeriSign: Cybersecurity starts with schools

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VeriSign

Charles Cooper CNET News.com

Published: 04 Jan 2005 14:15 GMT

But that's not what you have now. Why is that?
That is not what the current infrastructure allows it to be because you've got a lot of political biases and archaic governing bodies that all have to vote. Many times, you have your competitors voting on whether or not you should be able to deliver a service. And in the meantime -- while they delay you from delivering the service -- they introduce a competing one themselves.

I don't think that's ICANN management's fault. I think their new management would agree with the stance that processes need to be streamlined and much more transparent and that the biases need to be pulled out of the system. If they can get there, then we're all in support of ICANN. The reality is we should try to sort out the model for international regulation of a borderless infrastructure.

Where do you stand on forcing strong authentication of who has registries?
We are all for more privacy in the US system, strong authentication for the registrants and a process by which the intellectual property community can challenge that anonymity… through due course. Unfortunately, VeriSign is a security vendor, so if we say that, it looks like we're trying to sell product. It's just not a battle we see ourselves being able to lead the fight on.

As your company heads into 2005, does VeriSign plan to go in any different directions or will it be more of the same?
When we walked into 2004 the question was, "Can you be a growth company again?" As we exit the year, the old businesses have come back to be double-digit growers. Meanwhile, we've introduced a couple of new services that will give us incremental growth legs for next year. And finally, things like RFID and VoIP and Wi-Fi roaming can be put on the road map... and then as those markets take off, we plan to reposition for some additional growth there... So we kind of like the portfolio initiatives we have.

What about acquisitions? Is that something you're going to look at for next year?
I think we like the assets we've got. We don't have anything on our strategic agenda. But if another large carrier or large enterprise -- or the government -- came to us and said, "We'd really like you guys to extend what you are doing in this space," we might go looking. But we're talking about it as an add-on or customer-consolidation play as opposed to big strategic entry into another business.