Every .com website on Earth — from a teenager's blog to a Fortune 500 company's defensive brand registrations — pays the same company the same unavoidable fee, every year, forever. Washington built the toll booth, Washington took the brakes off it in 2018, and when its own regulator admitted years later that the price was too high, it turned out the government had already signed away its power to do anything about it.
Corporatocracy (noun): a system in which corporations, or an alliance of corporate power and government officials, effectively control public policy and the machinery of the state — regardless of which party holds nominal power.
A word before the reporting starts: This isn't a story about a shadowy backroom deal. Every document in this piece is public. NTIA's own press releases say, in NTIA's own words, what it did and why. That's what makes it worse, not better. Nobody hid this. A federal agency deregulated a monopoly's pricing "in line with policy priorities" of an administration, called it "reducing regulatory burden," and then — six years later, under a different administration's same agency — publicly admitted the price was too high and that it had no power left to fix it, because it had already signed that power away. This is what capture looks like when it isn't even trying to hide. Now, the reporting.
The toll nobody can opt out of
If you own a website that ends in .com — and roughly 160 million registrations worldwide do, according to the law firm now suing over this — you pay Verisign. Not your registrar. Not ICANN, exactly, though ICANN is entangled in this too. Verisign, a company most people who own a .com domain have never heard of, because Verisign doesn't sell you anything directly. It operates the .com registry: the master database that has to be updated every time a .com domain is registered, renewed, or transferred, and without which your website simply does not resolve.
You buy your domain through a registrar — GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, whoever. But every single one of those registrars, for every single .com domain, has to pay Verisign the same non-negotiable wholesale fee, currently $10.26 a year. That fee is baked into whatever you pay at checkout, no matter which registrar you use, because there is no registrar on Earth that can get you a .com domain without paying Verisign first. This is not a competitive market with a wholesale layer. It's a single point of extraction sitting underneath every retail storefront in the industry.
How one company came to own the internet's front door
Verisign didn't build the .com registry. It acquired it in 2000 by buying Network Solutions, which had run it since the early days of the commercial internet. From that point on, Verisign has operated .com under two overlapping government-created arrangements: a Registry Agreement with ICANN — the nonprofit created in 1998, at the direction of the U.S. Department of Commerce, specifically to keep the domain name system stable and competitive — and a separate Cooperative Agreement directly with Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is the one that actually governs what Verisign is allowed to charge.
This has not been a quiet arrangement. In 2003, Verisign launched a service called Site Finder that redirected users' failed web searches to its own search page — widely seen as an abuse of its position as an infrastructure provider — and ICANN forced it to shut down the service. Verisign sued ICANN. ICANN countersued. They settled in 2005 on terms that gave Verisign control of .com through 2012 and the right to raise prices 7% a year. Domain name trade groups sued to block that settlement, arguing it handed Verisign a "permanent monopoly." A federal court eventually agreed the concerns were serious: in 2009, the Ninth Circuit revived antitrust claims against Verisign, with the court noting specific allegations that Verisign had paid lobbyists, "stacked" ICANN's public meetings with its own supporters, hired ostensibly independent voices to advocate its position, paid bloggers, planted news stories critical of ICANN, and threatened ICANN with litigation and government investigation until ICANN reportedly agreed to pay Verisign a settlement fee in exchange for favorable contract terms. That is a federal appeals court's own characterization of the record, not a talking point from a plaintiff's lawyer.
The new class-action lawsuit filed this month alleges Verisign ran the same playbook again, more recently, to lock in what it calls "a years-long campaign of coercion against ICANN" that produced a "presumptive right of renewal" — language that forecloses any competitive bidding for the .com registry, indefinitely. Verisign currently holds 100% of that market and, per the complaint, a contractual right to keep it forever.
2018: the year Washington took the leash off, in its own words
Here is the part that should make you angry, and it doesn't require any inference, because the government said it out loud. Before 2018, .com wholesale prices were capped at $7.85 under price controls implemented during the Obama administration. On November 1, 2018, NTIA issued its own press release, publicly available on ntia.gov, announcing Amendment 35 to the Cooperative Agreement with Verisign. Read what it says, verbatim:
"These modifications are in line with policy priorities of the Trump Administration... 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... to reduce the regulatory burden on Verisign."
That's not a critic's summary. That is the U.S. government's own press release, explaining that it removed a consumer price protection as a matter of stated policy preference, and calling the removal of oversight over a monopoly a reduction in "regulatory burden", as if the burden in question belonged to Verisign, and not to the millions of people who'd now pay for it. The amendment allowed Verisign to raise prices up to 7% a year in four of every six years, and, per contemporaneous reporting on the amendment's terms, also stripped NTIA of its own prior authority to require competitive bidding for management of the .com registry, and limited NTIA's future authority to negotiate over price and other terms without Verisign's consent. The government didn't just loosen a rule. It signed away its own leverage to ever tighten it again without the monopoly's permission.
ICANN and Verisign locked in the mechanics with a formal amendment announced on January 3, 2020. ICANN's own press release laid out the price path in advance: $7.85 before the change, rising to $8.39 no earlier than October 2020, with a ceiling of $10.26 that could not be exceeded "until October 2026." That ceiling is exactly the price the new lawsuit says Verisign is charging today. In that same 2020 release, ICANN said this about itself: "ICANN is not a price regulator and defers to the Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of Justice for the regulation of pricing for .COM registry services." Note who that leaves holding responsibility; and note that Commerce had, two years earlier, already given away the tool it would have needed to act on that responsibility.
By 2024, even NTIA seemed to sense the problem. In a public statement about renewing the Cooperative Agreement, NTIA wrote: "NTIA recognizes concerns about current pricing and believes a reduction in .com prices would be in the best interest of the public." In the very same statement, it also wrote that "NTIA does not have authority to set .com domain prices" — despite being the agency whose contract sets the price cap. A 25-year domain industry veteran publicly called the statement "bizarre" for exactly that reason. The explanation is the 2018 "mutual agreement" clause: any change to pricing now requires Verisign's consent, and NTIA said plainly that "over the past several months, NTIA and Verisign have engaged in serious conversations, but... have been unable to agree on how wholesale .com pricing should change." The government wanted the price to come down. The government had already given away its own power to make that happen. The best it could get was a freeze at $10.26 through September 2026 — not a rollback. Writing about that outcome on December 1, 2024, one trade publication editor with 25 years in the domain industry predicted that any further push for lower prices would "likely die when the Trump administration takes office."
About a week before that freeze was announced, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Jerry Nadler sent NTIA and the Department of Justice a letter that used the word most people are afraid to use out loud: "Verisign and ICANN may have a collusive relationship," they wrote, in which Verisign has "used its monopoly power... to capture ICANN and its millions of consumers." They asked the DOJ to investigate violations of the Sherman Act. As of this writing, there is no public record of the DOJ having opened that investigation. It took a private class-action law firm, not the Department of Justice, to actually sue.
The math Verisign doesn't want you doing
According to the class-action complaint filed September 4, 2026, in the Central District of California, it costs Verisign roughly $3 to administer a .com registration. Comparable registries elsewhere in the world charge an average of $5 to $6. Verisign charges $10.26 — more than double its own cost and well above what competing offerings produce elsewhere. The result: Verisign's operating margin exceeds 67%, which the complaint says is higher than Apple, Microsoft, or Alphabet, and more than five times the S&P 500 average. In 2025 alone, Verisign returned more than $1 billion to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. Senator Warren's office separately noted that in 2023, Verisign authorized stock buybacks worth more than 75% of the company's total revenue for the year. This is not a company reinvesting monopoly profits into a better product. It is a company distributing them to shareholders, because a captive customer base with no alternative has no way to object.
Who actually pays this — and it is not just "big tech"
This is the part that gets lost in stories about corporate monopolies, so it's worth being explicit: no registrant of any size escapes this toll, and the toll works differently depending on who you are.
If you're an individual blogger or a solo creator with a .com domain, the dollar increase looks small in isolation — a few dollars a year — but you have zero market alternative. You cannot shop around because every registrar you shop with charges you the same underlying Verisign fee, plus a marginal markup. And you cannot simply switch to a cheaper alternative TLD once you've built anything on your domain: your backlinks, your email addresses, your search rankings, your business cards, and everyone who already knows your web address are all anchored to that one string. Verisign is, functionally, the only vendor for the product you already depend on.
If you're a small business or a nonprofit, the exposure is the same lock-in with higher stakes, because your .com domain usually is your public identity — your storefront, your email domain, your customer-facing brand — not a side project you can walk away from.
If you're a large corporation or a recognizable brand, the toll doesn't shrink — it multiplies. Big companies routinely register dozens or hundreds of defensive domains: misspellings, hyphenated variants, old product names, and country-specific versions of their brand, purely to keep cybersquatters and phishing operations from grabbing them first. Every one of those defensive registrations pays Verisign's fee, every year, indefinitely — meaning the biggest, most recognizable brands are paying this toll at the largest scale of all, a cost that ultimately gets absorbed into consumer prices, marketing budgets, or corporate security spending rather than out of Verisign's own pocket.
And if you're a domain investor — someone who holds a portfolio of unused .com names purely as a speculative asset — you feel the toll multiplied across your entire inventory, on names that may never even resolve to a live website. Tellingly, per NTIA's own account of its 2024 negotiations, Verisign's position was that scrutiny should focus on "prices... charged by resellers and substantial markups by warehousers" — that is, Verisign's own messaging tries to shift blame for high consumer costs downstream, onto registrars and domain investors, rather than onto its own wholesale fee, which is the one thing every single one of those parties is required to pay before anyone else marks anything up.
The common thread across every one of these registrants, from the smallest blog to the largest multinational's defensive portfolio: none of them has a competing option. All of them work for the same company. None of them can negotiate. That is what a monopoly toll looks like when it's dressed up as routine business overhead.
Why some domains sell for millions — and why that's completely legal
It's a fair question most coverage of this skips: if Verisign charges the same base fee for every .com registration, why do some domains — insurance.com sold for $35.6 million in 2020, CarInsurance.com for $49.7 million in 2019, Voice.com for $30 million in 2019 — go for such enormous sums, and why is it legal for people to buy and resell domain names for profit at all?
The registration itself is genuinely first-come, first-served, at the same base price regardless of how desirable the name is. Nobody pays Verisign or a registrar a premium at the moment of initial registration just because a name is valuable. The value is created afterward in a private secondary market because a domain registration is a renewable, exclusive right to use a specific name, and that right is explicitly transferable from one party to another. ICANN's own Transfer Policy is what makes that possible: it's the rule set that lets a registrant sell or assign their registration to someone else, and it's the same rule set that makes every legitimate domain sale, however large, function at all. Courts have generally treated a domain registration as a property-like interest that can be bought, sold, licensed, or fought over — not identical to owning a trademark or physical property, but a real, transferable asset nonetheless.
What drives the eye-popping prices is scarcity plus demand: nearly every short, memorable, generic, or keyword-matching .com name was claimed decades ago, during the internet's early years, by whoever happened to register it first. There is a fixed, shrinking supply of names like "insurance.com" or "voice.com," and a large and growing number of businesses that want the credibility, direct type-in traffic, and built-in search value that a plain-English keyword domain provides. That combination — fixed supply, rising demand — is a textbook scarcity market, the same dynamic that drives up prices for real estate or rare collectibles, just applied to a string of text.
Buying and reselling domain names for profit is legal as long as it's done in good faith on names that aren't already somebody else's trademark. It becomes illegal — a practice called cybersquatting — when someone registers a domain in bad faith specifically to profit from, extort, or divert traffic from an existing trademark holder. That conduct can be challenged through ICANN's Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP), an arbitration process, or under the federal Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, a 1999 law that lets trademark owners sue to recover a domain or collect damages. Legitimate domain investing in generic, non-trademarked names is protected speculation in a scarce asset. Cybersquatting on someone else's brand is not.
Here's the part that ties everything above back together: none of this activity escapes Verisign's toll. It multiplies exposure to it. Every domain that gets bought, sold, flipped, or held speculatively still owes Verisign its per-domain-year fee, every single year, for as long as it's registered to anyone. The richest, most active corner of the domain economy — the aftermarket — doesn't route around the monopoly. It's simply the segment of registrants paying the toll on the largest number of names at once.
The ICANN problem
ICANN was created specifically to prevent what has now happened: a single company using exclusive control over a piece of critical internet infrastructure to extract monopoly rents from everyone forced to use it. Instead, per the new lawsuit and per Senator Warren and Representative Nadler's own letter, ICANN — the entity charged with promoting competition — is now financially entangled with the very monopoly it was created to check. The lawmakers' letter states plainly that Verisign has "used its monopoly power... to capture ICANN." ICANN, for its part, has publicly disclaimed responsibility for pricing altogether, pointing back at the same Commerce Department and DOJ that had already surrendered their own leverage over the question in 2018. Every party in this chain has a documented, on-the-record reason for not being responsible. That is not an accident. That is what regulatory capture looks like when everyone involved can point at someone else and still be telling the truth.
What happened when someone finally sued
The 2009 case above was the last time a court weighed in. Here's the one that's actually new: on September 4, 2026, a law firm called Hagens Berman filed a fresh class-action antitrust suit against Verisign and ICANN in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, on behalf of .com domain owners. This is a separate, current case — not a revival of the 2009 ruling — and it's the news event that prompted this piece. Hagens Berman isn't a small player: coverage from September 2025 reported the firm had won a federal judge's certification of what was described as the largest class in U.S. history in a consumer antitrust case against Amazon, so its willingness to take this case on is itself a signal of how strong it believes the underlying facts are. The complaint's language is blunt. Steve W. Berman, the firm's managing partner: "Web domain owners and operators are often small businesses, entrepreneurs, non-profits, or sole proprietors, seeking to make a name and a living through their goods and services. Every year, Verisign extracts nearly a billion dollars in overcharges from these ordinary people and businesses... Rarely does a monopoly exist in such black-and-white terms as I believe it does here. Verisign didn't build .com. It bought it, made sure no one could compete for it, and has since raised prices at every opportunity."
The complaint quotes GoDaddy — the world's largest domain registrar, and a company with every commercial incentive to stay on Verisign's good side — conceding on the record that "from an end user's perspective, Verisign's .COM does not have natural competitors to constrain retail pricing within the market" and that "there is no effective competition to assist in establishing what is a reasonable price for .COM." When the largest retailer in an industry is willing to say publicly that there's no competition in its own supply chain, that is about as close to an admission against interest as this kind of case ever gets.
The suit brings claims under the Sherman Act for monopolization and restraint of trade, plus state unfair-competition claims, and seeks both an injunction and recovery of the overcharges. It is a private lawsuit — not a DOJ enforcement action, despite the DOJ having been asked directly nearly two years earlier to investigate exactly this.
Three honest ways to read this
First: this could be read as a straightforward monopoly story with a straightforward villain, and Verisign's conduct — documented by a federal appeals court in 2009 and alleged again in nearly identical terms in 2026 — supports that reading on its own.
Second: it could be read as a story about a regulator that, for a moment in 2018, made a specific, named, ideological choice to treat oversight of a monopoly as a "regulatory burden" to be reduced, and is still living with the consequences of that choice six years later, unable to undo it without the monopoly's permission.
Third, and hardest to sit with: it could be read as a story where nobody currently holds the power to fix this, even when they want to. NTIA says it wants lower prices but can't set them. ICANN says it isn't a price regulator. DOJ was asked to investigate and, as far as the public record shows, hasn't done so. Verisign is simply doing what its contracts allow. A system can produce an indefensible outcome without any single actor currently possessing the authority to stop it, which is arguably the most dangerous version of capture there is, because there's no one left to hold accountable in the moment it's happening.
What you can actually do with this
If you've registered or renewed a .com domain for personal or business use since 2022, the Hagens Berman lawsuit's own materials say you may have a claim as part of the proposed class — that's worth ten minutes of your time to look into, especially if you or your business holds more than a handful of domains.
If you want to add your voice to the record, Warren and Nadler's November 2024 letter to NTIA and DOJ is public; contacting your own senators and representatives to ask whether DOJ ever acted on that request costs nothing and creates a paper trail.
And the next time someone tells you government regulation is what's driving up prices on something you rely on, it's worth checking which direction the regulation actually moved — because in this case, the price went up specifically because a 2018 decision moved regulation out of the way, not because regulation got in it.
A closing word: I don't think this is a story about one bad company, though Verisign has earned every bit of the description above. I think it's a story about how a government that runs on this many overlapping, buck-passing points of "we don't have the authority" ends up functionally indistinguishable from a government that never intended to have that authority in the first place. Nobody has to conspire for a corporatocracy to function. They each just have to be able to say truthfully that the failure wasn't specifically their part of the machine. Every party in this piece can say that. That's not an accident of bad luck. That's the design working exactly as the people who built it in 2018 intended.
Sources
- Lauren Berg, "Verisign, ICANN Accused Of Locking In .Com Monopoly," Law360, September 4, 2026.
- Business Wire, "Hagens Berman Files Antitrust Class-Action Lawsuit Against Verisign and ICANN Alleging Billions of Dollars in Illicit Gains from Website Domain Owners," September 4, 2026 (republished via The AI Journal).
- Senator Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Jerry Nadler, "Warren, Nadler Urge Regulators To Take Action on Verisign's Monopoly Over .Com Website Prices," press release and letter to NTIA/DOJ, warren.senate.gov, November 22, 2024.
- NTIA, "NTIA Statement on Amendment 35 to the Cooperative Agreement with Verisign," ntia.gov, November 1, 2018 (direct primary source).
- ICANN, "ICANN and Verisign Announce Proposed Amendment to .COM Registry Agreement," icann.org, January 3, 2020 (direct primary source).
- NTIA, statement on the .com Cooperative Agreement renewal, ntia.gov, November 2024, as quoted and analyzed in Andrew Allemann, "NTIA issues bizarre statement about .com pricing," Domain Name Wire, December 1, 2024.
- Annie Youderian, "Court Revives Claim That VeriSign Monopolizes Domain Registration," Courthouse News Service, June 9, 2009 (Ninth Circuit ruling, Coalition for ICANN Transparency v. VeriSign).
- Pinsent Masons, "ICANN and VeriSign face antitrust lawsuits," Out-Law News, November 30, 2005 (background on the 2003 Site Finder dispute and 2005 settlement).
- Widely corroborated industry sales figures for Insurance.com ($35.6M, 2020), CarInsurance.com ($49.7M, 2019), and Voice.com ($30M, 2019), cross-referenced across multiple domain-industry trade publications and Wikipedia's "List of most expensive domain names."