>Verisign’s financial filings indicate it costs Verisign approximately $3 per domain to operate .com domains

to maintain a few hundred bytes in a database small enough to be served from a computer from the 90s?

It’s not just Verisign on .com; the entire gTLD system is corrupt (ccTLDs vary). .org and .info are probably even clearer examples.

I have wondered at times whether gTLDs were a mistake and everything should have been under ccTLDs.

Aren't we close to decentralised domains or some sort of easy and open web indentifiers? But I think whatever we go for there are always middle-entities (aka middlemen). Crypto, and everything else. The choice comes down to either having to something like a SHA256 hash as an identifier or pay somone and then also get controlled by that someone and then with that comes the whole charade and laundry list of potential problems. That's why classic domains stuck around. Everything is a hassle and controlled, so go with something that is actually established.

Same goes for payment methods. I recently tried to buy some crypto to pay for (legally) at some "legit" sites like openrouter. I gave up after 2-3 days. Tried exchanges in my own country and also some famous non-local ones that are legally compliant to operate in my country and goodness it was a clusterfuck of darkpatterns and nightmare of steps and waits and locks and what not. I finally just created a temp card on my banking app with tiny credit spend limits and got done with it.

We attack the wrrong problems. Like "make it decentralised"! The thing is the decentralised immediately becomes centralised for any meaningful usage and often much worse and slower and in some cases costlier. Imho, we should rather work for "make them accountable" and the accountability should be decentralised to different countries and eventually to people. But then this happens via Govts and even the ones that are actually elected by people don't like to give such powers into the hands of the people and lose contorl.

I'm curious. That's the class action from US residents. Would this thing effectively force Verisign to overcharge those purchasing .com domains from outside of the US (while lowering the price for those inside the US)?

This whole case seems to hinge on the argument that .com domains somehow constitute their own market, instead of being just part of wider domain name market with plenty of competing registrys. That might prove difficult argument in court.

I really hope VeriSign will lose this battle, it will serve as a lesson to this awful company. VerSign is vampirizing the internet. They hold a very important power on the whole infrastructure and they are the opposite of a good steward. The third-level .name fiasco [1] in itself should have led the ICANN to stop working with VeriSign and give their TLD management to other actors, ideally non-profit structures. Instead of that the ICANN let them go with it based on the flat out lies VeriSign wrote in their request, and denied requests for reconsideration based on the same lies. So maybe this class-action in justice is the only way to get through to VeriShit.

[1] https://p4bl0.net/post/2026/10/VeriSign-is-VeriShit

The real class action case is that the huge stream of money flow is not cashing in Europe at all, not a cent. Who the f owns the infrastructure? If I buy a domain from and in Europe the money got to stay in Europe.

Nice! I signed up! I hope more class action lawsuit are brought up about the greedy registrars who are abusing their monopolies! And, finally, a class action lawsuit against ICANN, which legitimizes these monopolies, and, I won't be surprised, its decision makers get payments under the table for the vastly profitable redemption, and "deleted" domains aftermarket!

Imagine you fail to pay your cellphone bill, which is much higher per year than a domain renewal, and then your operator puts your number on auction and your competitors buys it and start taking your clients' calls.

I just renewed domain name I own for maybe 20+ years, for $23/yr. This is nuts.

Cumulative inflation in the US since 2021 has been around 25%? 30% if counting since 2020.

I've always hypothesized this was going on. It'll be interesting to see the results.

The internet needs an independent tld that’s not controlled by any entity, I see a lot of people over selling self hosting as the ultimate freedom, and while it’s great and better than relying in saas, you are still under the mercy of some entity and have a single point of failure in your setup. And before someone chimes in, onion aren’t practical.

Great, I'm going to get a check for $0.01! Totally worth the millions the lawyers will get.

seems commensurate with inflation

fees have a PoW/PoS function, too cheap a fee will cause spam and squatting.

let’s be real, 10$/yr is less than 1$/month, .com domains are cheap

I'm curious how this will go in practice. Verisign's monopoly over the .com domain is granted by an agreement between Verisign and the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The agreement regulates pricing of .com domains, but the price controls determine how quickly Verisign can raise its prices rather than requiring prices to reflect the actual cost of operating the domain registry. The wholesale .com price was frozen at $7.85 for years, but in 2018 the NTIA decided to let Verisign start raising the prices. When the agreement was signed, the NTIA released this statement https://www.ntia.gov/press-release/2018/ntia-statement-amend... :

> NTIA and Verisign have agreed to extend and modify the Cooperative Agreement. These modifications are in line with policy priorities of the Trump Administration. The changes create a new commitment to content neutrality in the Domain Name System (DNS), provide market-based pricing flexibility, and reduce the regulatory burden on Verisign.

> Amendment 35 confirms that Verisign will operate the .com registry in a content neutral manner with a commitment to participate in ICANN processes. To that end, NTIA looks forward to working with Verisign and other ICANN stakeholders in the coming year on trusted notifier programs to provide transparency and accountability in the .com top level domain.

> The amendment repeals Obama-era price controls and provides Verisign the pricing flexibility to change its .com Registry Agreement with ICANN to increase wholesale .com prices. Specifically, the flexibility permits Verisign to pursue with ICANN an up to 7 percent increase in the prices for .com domain names, in each of the last four years of the six-year term of the .com Registry Agreement. The changes also affirm that Verisign may not vertically integrate or operate as a registrar in the .com top level domain.

In 2024, the NTIA announced that it had renewed its agreement with Verisign. Their statement said that the NTIA believed that lower .com prices would be in the public interest, but were unable to reach an agreement with Verisign on pricing https://www.ntia.gov/blog/2024/com-cooperative-agreement-ens... .

The reason why the NTIA were no longer able to limit wholesale .com pricing was due to the 2018 amendment to the .com contract basically removing all negotiating leverage the NTIA had over Verisign. The amendment included provisions that made the agreement automatically renew every six years unless the NTIA gave timely notice of nonrenewal (so if the two sides couldn't reach an agreement it would continue in its current form), and allowing Verisign to continue operating the .com TLD even if the agreement was terminated.

The plaintiffs will have to prove that Verisign was acting unlawfully despite its prices being explicitly permitted by its arrangements with the US government. They'll also have to prove that they even have grounds to sue, when the Illinois Brick doctrine establishes that indirect purchasers of goods/services can't seek damages for antitrust violations. In this case, this means that the end domain purchasers may be unable to sue because they purchased their domains from registrars rather than directly from Verisign.

gTLDs at least have some minimal level of accountability and security standards.

ccTLDs are at the whim of the country. If you went with the '.su' ccTLD from the soviet union some years back, well, that would have been quite unfortunate.

Legally I feel like they're also worse. Like, say you're an abortion clinic operating in the regressive country of the US, and you get a '.us' ccTLD, surely it's more likely the government outlaws abortions and censors your domain via the registrar than if you used a '.com'?

ccTLDs have their own problems, many of them have been effectively privatized and are operated just like gTLDs.

One particular weird example would be the Bulgarian .bg TLD: https://eualternative.eu/guides/bulgaria-bg-private-registry...

> Instead of that the ICANN let them go with it based on the flat out lies VeriSign wrote in their request

Unfortunately, I’m not sure if there are actually any lies in their request <https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/consensus-policies/rsep-2...>.

To begin with, the form is really not well-applicable to such requests, but is nonetheless the process that gets used for such things.

Partly because of that, and partly because there are specific meanings of things in the field, there are various things that look like lies, but which aren’t actually. Saying “there will not be any effect on the life cycle of domain names” in §2.1, for example, is technically true: it doesn’t change the life cycle of domain-names-as-a-category, it just deletes a bunch of names (which you could describe as affecting their life cycles!) and removes a category of possible names from registration.

There are also things like §3.6, “Have you communicated with any of the entities whose products or services might be affected by the introduction of your proposed service?” where they just said “no”. (I think most people’s idea that there were lies springs from this section, and misunderstanding that the two sentences of the answer are responding to the two questions; they’re not saying that communicating with people is not applicable.) Irresponsible, and an obvious eyebrow-raiser, but presumably true. My biggest complaint on technicalities would be in §6.2 where they said they consulted with “a select group of registrars comprising a majority of the user base”… whereas I’d consider the registrants to be the user base, and they have said they didn’t consult with them.

§5.1 is perhaps the most ridiculous to me, though, when they say “yeah, our contract says we have to do third-level registrations, we’ll talk about removing that from the contract after discontinuing them”. Probably a part of the procedure, given how they word things, but ludicrous all the same.

They’re also definitely incapable of following instructions. In §5.1 when instructed to write “N/A” they wrote “Not applicable”, and in §7.3 when instructed to write “N/A.” they wrote “None.”