Neustar
Neustar, Inc., is an American technology company that provides real-time information and analytics for the Internet, risk, digital performance, defense, telecommunications, entertainment, and marketing industries, and also provides clearinghouse and directory services to the global communications and Internet industries. Neustar is the domain name registry for a number of top-level domains, including .biz, .us (on behalf of United States Department of Commerce), .co, .nyc (on behalf of the city of New York), and .in (on behalf of the National Internet Exchange of India). Until the end of 2018, Neustar was also a North American Numbering Plan Administrator  under behalf of the Federal Communications Commission, a role continued from its founder, Lockheed Martin. Their first contract was granted in 1997 and was renewed under its spun-off in 1999, 2004, and 2012. Since 2019, it has been replaced by Somos, Inc. History. Neustar was founded in Delaware in 1998 as a business unit within Lockheed Martin Corporation. It was spun off to keep the neutrality that was essential to its original core contract with the nation's telecommunications providers. In November 2006, it bought Followap, Inc., a UK-based enabler of mobile instant messaging services. In 2010, Lisa  Hook was named the firm's President and Chief Operating Officer. In January 2010, "The Washington Post" reported that under Hook's leadership, Neustar was chosen by a consortium of Hollywood studios and technology executives to manage a system whereby consumers could access movies and other video entertainment from multiple digital devices. This system was named "UltraViolet". Over the next years, Neustar bought several companies: TARGUSInfo (2011), Aggregate Knowledge (2013) and .CO Internet (2014). In 2015, Neustar entered into an asset purchase agreement with Transaction Network Services for their caller authentication assets. In the following year, Neustar planned to split  into two independent publicly traded companies. This plan was abandoned later that year when Golden Gate Capital and GIC announced to buy all Neustar public shares for approximately $2.9 billion ($33.50 per share). This was completed by August 2017. In 2016, Neustar lost its NPAC contract to Ericsson subsidiary Telcordia. Neustar had administered the number portability system since 1997. The local-number-portability administrator (LNPA) was created to handle the Number Portability Administration Center (NPAC), which enables users to take their phone numbers with them when they switch service providers. The NPAC manages the routing of all calls  and texts for more than 650 million US and Canadian phone numbers for more than 2,000 carriers. In July 2018, Charles Gottdiener was appointed as president and chief executive officer, succeeding Lisa Hook. In October, Neustar announced that it bought Verisign's security services customer contracts. This includes DDoS protection, DNS firewall, and managed and recursive DNS services customer contracts. Three months later, Neustar bought TRUSTID, a caller authentication and fraud prevention systems provider for contact centers. In April 2020, GoDaddy announced that it would be buying Neustar's domain name registry business. The new service will be called GoDaddy  Registry. The deal was expected to be finalized within the next two months. In late 2021, Neustar was bought by TransUnion for 3.1 billion. However, Neustar's security business, Neustar Security Services, was excluded from the transaction and remained as a portfolio company of Golden Gate Capital and GIC. Business. From 1998 until 2015, the original business of Neustar was the administration of the North American Numbering Plan, the maintenance of the system of directories and databases that manage the telephone area codes and central office prefixes in North America. This enables the routing of calls among thousands of competing  communications service providers (CSPs). Neustar also provided clearinghouse services to emerging CSPs, including Internet service providers (ISPs), mobile network operators, cable television operators, and "voice over Internet protocol" (VoIP) service providers. Neustar offers internal and external managed Domain name system (DNS) services that play a role in directing and managing traffic in the Internet, cloud-based DDoS attack protection and website performance management tools. Neustar manages the authoritative directories for the .us and .biz Internet domains, and acts as the worldwide "registry gateway" for China's .cn and Taiwan's .tw Internet domains outside of these two countries. Neustar also  provides back end registry services for .co Top Level Domain. Neustar manages a collection of these directories that maintain addresses to direct, prioritize and manage Internet traffic, and find and resolve Internet queries and top-level domains on behalf of its enterprise customers. Neustar serves as the provider of registry services and manages directories of similar resources, or addresses, that its customers use for access and connectivity. Neustar previously operated the authoritative directory for U.S. Common Short Codes, part of the short messaging service (SMS) relied upon by the U.S. wireless industry, and provides solutions used by mobile network operators  to enable mobile instant messaging for their end users. CTIA granted that contract to Iconectiv, who took over providing Common Short Code (CSC) Registry Services on January 1, 2016. Neustar offered a "Digital Rights Locker" for Hollywood studios, consumer electronics manufacturers and retailers looking for Digital restrictions management, such as UltraViolet and the planned Mobile DTV Trust Authority (MDTV) Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC). UltraViolet was shut down on July 31, 2019.