U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren | Warren, Nadler Urge Regul...

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) wrote to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and Department of Justice, urging them to protect millions of .com website owners, including small businesses, by ensuring competition in the top-level domain (TLD) market. 

Right now, Verisign has exclusive control over the .com TLD, the last segment of a website’s domain name, such as .com, .net, or .org. The .com TLD is used by 150 million websites, nearly half of all global websites, and every registered website that uses .com must pay an annual fee to Verisign. As a result, Verisign can squeeze customers and raise prices excessively. 

This problem only got worse under the Trump administration. During Trump's first term, NTIA eased preexisting restrictions on Verisign’s price hikes, and since then Verisign has raised the price of its annual registration fee by more than 30% – while doing little to change or improve its services. Verisign uses this profit to buy back stocks, authorizing stock buybacks worth over 75 percent of the Company’s total revenue for 2023.

“Verisign has squeezed customers to enrich its investors while doing little to improve service,” wrote the lawmakers. “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.”

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