U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. Jerry Nadler of Up-to-date York have called on government authorities to investigate what they say is “predatory pricing” of .com web addresses, prime real estate on the Internet.
In a letter delivered today to the Department of Justice and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch of the Commerce Department that advises the president, the two Democrats accuse VeriSign, the company that manages the .com top-level domain, of abusing its market dominance to overcharge customers.
In 2018, under the Donald Trump administration, NTIA modified the conditions regarding how much VeriSign can charge for .com domains. The company has since raised its prices by 30 percent, according to the letter, although its services remain the same and could allegedly be provided by others much cheaper.
“VeriSign uses its monopoly power to charge millions of users excessive prices for registering the .com top-level domain,” the letter says. “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 August blog post titled “Setting the Record,” the company claimed that the discourse around .com management had been “distorted by factual inaccuracies, misunderstanding of basic technical concepts, and misinterpretations about pricing, competition, and market dynamics in the domain name industry.” “
In the same blog post, the company argues that it does not operate in a monopolistic manner because there are 1,200 generic top-level domains operated by third parties, including .org, .shop, .ai and .uk.
Although not a household name, VeriSign generates approximately $1.5 billion in revenue each year for operating a specific portion of the impenetrable Internet installation.
In their letter, Warren and Nadler maintain that VeriSign has used its exclusive right to charge fees for highly sought-after .com addresses to increase its revenues and drive up its stock price – all at the expense of customers for whom it has no viable alternative.
The letter said separate agreements with NTIA and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit organization created by the Department of Commerce to oversee the Internet domain name system, allowed VeriSign to establish a monopoly position. The former determines how much a company can charge its customers to register .com addresses, while the latter designates VeriSign as the “sole operator” of the .com domain. The letter also alleged that VeriSign may be violating the Sherman Act.