Federal Contractors | Technology 2023: D. JAMES BIDZOS

CHAIRMAN AND CEO, VERISIGN, RESTON

Published August 30, 2023 by Virginia Business

An early advocate of encryption in commercial software, Bidzos is an internet and cybersecurity pioneer. Verisign is the largest internet domain name registry and infrastructure provider. Any address with a .com or .net domain suffix is registered with Verisign. With 350 million registered addresses on its list and 3.5 million more registering in the first quarter of 2023, Verisign keeps growing. It has 917 employees and reported $1.42 billion in revenue last year, up from $1.33 billion in 2021.

Bidzos, a Greek native and citizen, founded Verisign in 1995 as a spinoff of his work at RSA Data Security, an information security company that became one of the earliest encryption developers for commercial software. Bidzos started his career at IBM in the 1970s.

Last fall, Bidzos caught flak from federal lawmakers for resisting calls to join the “trusted notifier” initiative to identify and eventually disable digital piracy websites. Bidzos argued that a previous agreement with the Department of Commerce requires that Verisign operate in a content-neutral manner. “Verisign does not engineer its infrastructure nor adopt operational policies based on our own views,” Bidzos said in a statement.

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