Warren Accuses Verisign of Web Domain Registration Monopoly

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is calling for an antitrust investigation into the web domain registration business.

The Democratic lawmaker from Massachusetts — working with Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) — wrote last week to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and Department of Justice to enforce competition in the top-level domain (TLD) market.

At the moment, Warren said in her announcement, that market is controlled by a company called Verisign. Anyone who wants a website address ending in .com — a TLD used by 150 million websites — must pay the company a yearly fee.

“Verisign has squeezed customers to enrich its investors while doing little to improve service,” the lawmakers wrote. “Verisign is ripping off the owners of 150 million .com websites by charging over $10 annually for each .com registration, making over $1 billion with its predatory pricing scheme that the Company then uses to pad its shareholders’ pockets.”

Warren and Nadler argue the problem got worse during President Donald Trump’s first term, when the NTIA eased restrictions on Verisign’s price hikes, allowing the company to increase the price of its annual registration fee by more than 30%.

The lawmaker’s efforts come months after The American Economic Liberties Project and other groups called on NTIA and the Justice Department not to renew Verisign’s no-bid contract, alleging that the company held a monopoly on the TLD sector.

“VeriSign is a prime example of an economic termite, and has used its government-approved monopoly over domains to hike prices with no justification for far too long,” said Laurel Kilgour, research manager at the American Economic Liberties Project.

The company has responded to these allegations on its blog, arguing that the discussions of its management of .com had been “distorted by factual inaccuracies, a misunderstanding of core technical concepts, and misinterpretations regarding pricing, competition and market dynamics in the domain name industry.”

“Further, from a practical perspective, the technical nature of TLD registries requires that they each be run by a single operator, but with so many operators in the marketplace, consumers have a broad and diverse array of choices at a range of prices,” Verisign said. “Other TLDs like .org, .shop, .ai, and .uk are not ‘monopolies’ and neither is .com.”