U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York have called on government agencies to investigate what they allege is the “predatory pricing” of .com web addresses, the Internet’s main real estate.
In a letter delivered today to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a branch of the Department of Commerce (DOC) that advises the US president, the two Democrats accuse VeriSign, the company that manages the .com top-level domain, from abusing its domain in the marketplace to overcharge customers.
In 2018, under the Donald Trump administration, the NTIA modified the terms of how much VeriSign could charge for .com domains. The company has since increased prices by 30 percent, the letter states, although its service remains identical and others could supposedly provide it at a much cheaper price.
“VeriSign is exploiting its monopoly power to charge millions of users excessive prices to register a .com top-level domain,” the letter states. “VeriSign has not changed or improved its services; “It has simply increased prices because it has a government-guaranteed monopoly.”
VeriSign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in August blog post Titled “Setting the Record Straight,” the company claimed that the discourse around its management of .com had been “distorted by factual inaccuracies, a misunderstanding of basic technical concepts, and misinterpretations regarding pricing, competition, and market dynamics in the domain name industry. “
In the same blog post, the company argues that it does not operate as a monopoly because there are 1,200 generic top-level domains operated by other entities, including .org, .shop, .ai or .uk.
Although far from a household name, VeriSign makes about $1.5 billion in revenue each year for servicing their particular section of the Internet’s inscrutable plumbing.
In their letter, Warren and Nadler allege that VeriSign has exploited its exclusive right to charge for highly sought-after .com addresses to boost its revenue and boost its stock price, all at the expense of customers for whom there is no viable alternative.
The letter claims that separate agreements with the NTIA and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit organization established by the DOC to oversee the Web’s domain name system, have allowed VeriSign establish monopoly power. The first establishes how much the company can charge its clients for registering .com addresses, while the second assigns VeriSign as the “sole operator” of the .com domain. The letter also alleges that VeriSign may be violating the Sherman Act.