CW> So...correct me if I'm wrong here...does this mean that the CW> registry services operations and the GTLD maintenance CW> operations for .com/.net will be owned by different CW> companies?

I wonder just how different they are, and what deals are being made under the table.

People don't normally draw a distinction between the registry and the GTLD operations. Normally people just assume that GTLD operations is part of the registry service. There are other GTLD registries that have outsourced the operation of their TLD DNS server operations but the key here is who controls the contents of the TLD zone. In every case, that is the GTLD registry so I don't think it would make any difference to the situation if Verisign were to spin off the GTLD operations. Remember, this whole thing was sparked by Verisign adding a wildcard record to the .COM and .NET zones. They didn't change their DNS servers; they just added bad data to them. --Michael Dillon