AS7342 VERISIGN-AS

VERISIGN-AS is the network of Verisign, the American company that operates the .com and .net domain registries and a large share of the internet's authoritative DNS machinery. The ASN is registered to VeriSign Infrastructure & Operations in Reston, Virginia.

What it's used for

• Verisign's DNS and registry infrastructure. Announced prefixes carry netnames like VGRSGTLD and VGRS — VeriSign Global Registry Services — confirming the space is registry and resolution infrastructure rather than corporate desktops.
• The routing footprint is unmistakably anycast: about 129 IPv4 /24s and 128 IPv6 /48s, drawn from ARIN (199.7.48.0, 209.131.128.0, 64.6.64.0, 216.87.128.0), RIPE (81.19.192.0, 217.30.80.0) and APNIC (103.87.108.0) space. Announcing many small identical-sized blocks from every region is how you put the same service in dozens of places at once.

Notable

• This is critical infrastructure, and it fits none of the usual categories. The addresses are neither eyeball subscribers nor rented hosting; they are servers answering DNS queries for a large fraction of the world's domain names.
• Because the prefixes are anycast, an IP here has no single meaningful physical location — the same address answers from a different site depending on where the query comes from. Geolocation of this space is inherently approximate.
• Registered with ARIN in November 1996, when Verisign's predecessor businesses were being built out around the same registry role.