U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Congressman Jerry Nadler of New York have called on government agencies to investigate what they say is the “predatory pricing” of .com web addresses, the Internet's prime real estate.
In a letter delivered today to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a division of the Department of Commerce (DOC) that advises the US President, the two Democrats accuse VeriSign, the company that the administration controls the .com top-level domain, abusing its market dominance to overcharge customers.
In 2018, under the Donald Trump administration, the NTIA changed the terms for how much VeriSign could charge for .com domains. The company has since increased prices by 30 percent, the letter claims, although the service remains identical and could reportedly be provided much cheaper by others.
“VeriSign is exploiting its monopolistic power to charge millions of users exorbitant prices to register a .com top-level domain,” the letter alleges. “VeriSign has not changed or improved its services; it simply raised prices because it has a government-guaranteed monopoly.”
VeriSign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in an August blog post titled “Setting The Record Straight,” the company claimed that the discourse surrounding .com's management had been “distorted by factual inaccuracies, a misunderstanding of key technical concepts and misinterpretations regarding pricing, competition and market dynamics. in the domain name industry.”
In the same blog post, the company states that it does not have a monopoly because there are 1,200 generic top-level domains managed by other entities, including .org, .shop, .ai or .uk.
While far from a household name, VeriSign generates around $1.5 billion in revenue annually to maintain a certain part of the Internet's inscrutable sewer system.
In their letter, Warren and Nadler allege that VeriSign has abused its exclusive right to charge for highly sought-after .com addresses to undermine its revenues and increase its stock price – all at the expense of customers for whom there is no viable alternative .
The letter alleges that separate agreements with the NTIA and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit organization created by the DOC to oversee the Web's domain name system, have allowed VeriSign to gain monopoly power . The letter also alleges that VeriSign may be in violation of the Sherman Act. The former determines how much the company can charge its customers for registering .com addresses, while the latter assigns VeriSign as the “sole administrator” of the .com domain.
