The Commerce Department's review of the agreement that extends the computer security firm's control of the '.com' domain has the company thinking twice, sources say.

The Commerce Department's review of the agreement that extends the computer security firm's control of the '.com' domain has the company thinking twice, sources say. Representatives of VeriSign and the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers met Tuesday for a second day of talks as government officials weighed the fate of VeriSign's lucrative domain-name deal with ICANN. But after failing to reach agreement, the parties recessed for the day and agreed to meet again Wednesday, according to people familiar with the talks. On Tuesday, the sources said VeriSign, based in Mountain View, Calif., was even considering whether it should simply walk away from the latest deal with ICANN, under which it would manage registration of the ".com" domain until at least 2007, relinquish control of the ".org" domain next year and run the ".net" domain at least until 2005. If the company abandons the deal, it would abide by a 1999 deal to keep managing the database of all three domains through 2007 while relinquishing its business of registering new names. Commerce Department officials first told VeriSign and ICANN on Monday that they had serious concerns about the deal reached last month to allow Verisign to continue to manage the database of all Internet addresses ending in ".com" while also continuing to sell registrations of new addresses. The major sticking point arose from a letter that the Justice Department sent to the Department of Commerce warning that the deal would harm competition in the nascent business of registering Internet names, people familiar with the negotiations said. The letter opposed the so-called vertical integration of VeriSign's managing of the ".com" database and registering new names in the database, sources said.