Elizabeth Warren Calls for Crackdown on Internet ‘Monopoly’ You’ve Never Heard Of

US Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Congressman Jerry Nadler of New York have called on federal agencies to investigate what they suspect is “precarious pricing” of .com web addresses, the Internet’s prime real estate.

In a letter sent today to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), a branch of the Department of Commerce (DOC) that advises the US President, two Democrats accused VeriSign, the company that owns it. .com domain name, for abusing its market dominance to overcharge customers.

In 2018, under the administration of Donald Trump, the NTIA changed the terms of how much VeriSign can charge for .com domains. The company has since raised prices by 30 percent, the letter says, even though its service remains the same and may be offered much cheaper by others.

“VeriSign is using its licensing power to charge millions of users exorbitant prices to register .com top-level domains,” the letter said. “VeriSign has not changed or improved its services; it just raises the prices because it has the mandate guaranteed by the government.”

VeriSign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in an August blog post titled “Setting the Record Straight,” the company said talk about its .com executives was “distorted by inaccurate facts, misunderstandings of core technical concepts, and misinterpretations about pricing, competition, and market forces.” in the domain name industry.”

In the same blog post, the company argues that it does not use independence because there are 1,200 common top-level domains used by other businesses, including .org, .shop, .ai or .uk.

Although it’s far from a household name, VeriSign takes in an estimated $1.5 billion a year to provide its unbreakable pipelines division on the Internet.

In their letter, Warren and Nadler allege that VeriSign has exploited its exclusive right to charge for high-demand .com addresses to squeeze revenue and increase its share price—all at the expense of customers with no recourse.

The letter says separate agreements with the NTIA and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit organization established by the DOC to oversee the Web’s domain name system, allowed VeriSign to establish a monopoly. The letter also claims that VeriSign may be in violation of the Sherman Act. The former sets how much a company can charge its customers for registering .com addresses, while the latter assigns VeriSign as the “sole operator” of .com domains.