US Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Congressman Jerry Nadler of New York have called for government bodies to investigate what they allege is the “outrageous pricing” of .com web addresses, the Internet's prime real estate.
In a letter delivered today to the Justice Department and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch of the Commerce Department that advises the president, the two Democrats accused VeriSign, the company that manages the .com top-level domain, of abuses. It dominates the market to charge customers more.
In 2018, under the Donald Trump administration, NTIA modified the terms on How much can VeriSign charge for a .com domain. The letter claims the company has since increased prices by 30 percent, even though its service is similar and can reportedly be provided far more cheaply by others.
“VeriSign is exploiting its monopoly power to charge millions of users excessive prices to register .com top-level domains,” the letter claims. “VeriSign has not made any changes or improvements to its services; It has raised prices only because it has a monopoly ensured by the government.”
VeriSign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in August one blog post Entitled “Setting the record straight”, the company claimed that conversations about the management of .com were “filled with factual inaccuracies, misunderstandings of key technical concepts and misinterpretations about pricing, competition and market dynamics in the domain name industry.” It has become distorted.”
In the same blog post, the company argues that it is not operating a monopoly because there are 1,200 generic top-level domains operated by other entities, including .org, .shop, .ai, and .uk.
However, VeriSign is far from a household name Generates revenue of approximately $1.5 billion Each year to serve its special section of esoteric plumbing on the Internet.
In their letter, Warren and Nadler allege that VeriSign abused its exclusive right to charge for highly sought-after .com addresses in order to inflate its revenues and boost its stock price – all at the expense of those customers. But it has been done for those for whom there is no viable alternative.
The letter claims that separate agreements with NTIA and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit established by the Commerce Department to oversee the Web's domain name system, allowed VeriSign to Allowed to establish monopoly power. The former determines how much the company can charge its customers to register .com addresses, while the latter designates VeriSign as the “sole operator” of .com domains. The letter also alleges that VeriSign may be in violation of the Sherman Act.