The entire market for domain name registries is broken, a troubling combination of government-granted monopoly, disinterested (at best) regulators, and eager extractors of profit. Users pay a relatively trivial amount for the rights to website names, and don’t really notice the enormous amounts of excess profit taken from them and hundreds of millions of their colleagues, a few bucks at a time.
The entire market for domain name registries is broken, a troubling combination of government-granted monopoly, disinterested (at best) regulators, and eager extractors of profit.
Verisign controls the registries for .com and .net, two of the internet’s most popular. All it does is administer a database and collect small sums from website owners, but with computing power rising and practically no marginal cost to adding another website to the database, the entire enterprise is a license to print money. In the third quarter of 2019, Verisign showed operating income of $205.6 million on $308.4 million in revenues, a profitability margin of 66.67 percent. This makes Verisign one of the most profitable companies in the world.
Verisign’s compe ors have consistently offered to provide the same service at a fraction of what Verisign charges, but the company has an exclusive contract to manage .com and .net with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit that oversees top-level domains. I wrote about Verisign for The Nation in 2018.