Most of the costs to provide digital services are salaries for the employees. You need engineers, support staff, lawyers, and some supporting roles like finance and security/compliance to meet the legal and contractual obligations of the service.
Sure, but remember that Verisign manages a total of 179 million domains. They also have less than 1,000 employees. Can they really have a salary cost of >$530K per employee? It's obviously the executive team that pockets most of that cost.
...$530K cost to employ is actually not unheard of for a US based software company, actually. (i.e. including office space, equipment, healthcare, benfits and corporate taxes). Maybe slightly on the high side though.
This whole case seems to hinge on the argument that .com domains somehow constitute their own market, instead of being just part of wider domain name market with plenty of competing registrys. That might prove difficult argument in court.
This is actually a part of the reason why I wonder whether gTLDs were a mistake. You end up with monsters like the (offensively-named) private equity firm “Ethos Capital” who have indulged in typical private-equity behaviour and what I will call credibly-alleged corruption, in order to take over more and more of the domain name registration system, and exploit it where they can (e.g. .info rates are I think more than triple what they were when I registered in 2008, where .com has gone up by only something like 10%).
The story of .org price caps and the Ethos Capital sale, where sanity prevailed in about nine tenths of one of the two cases (Ethos Capital didn’t get to buy .org, but they do operate it), shows some of these issues.
I just wonder if, in the absence of gTLDs which it can own, with only ccTLDs to operate, Afilias might not have become the monster it did.
I am naive for hoping things might have turned out better, but… maybe.
gTLDs at least have some minimal level of accountability and security standards.
ccTLDs are at the whim of the country. If you went with the '.su' ccTLD from the soviet union some years back, well, that would have been quite unfortunate.
Legally I feel like they're also worse. Like, say you're an abortion clinic operating in the regressive country of the US, and you get a '.us' ccTLD, surely it's more likely the government outlaws abortions and censors your domain via the registrar than if you used a '.com'?
I believe you made the wrong example using US, since gTLD like ".com" are de facto controlled also by US companies.
If we instead take another country, like Italy, the reasoning would be sound. If Italian governament bans abortions in Italy, it's more likely that the auhtorities are able to restrict the sites registered on .it than .com
> If you went with the '.su' ccTLD from the soviet union some years back, well, that would have been quite unfortunate.
.su is still being operated. Still being sold, even. How bad .su is for you depends on how friendly you are with the current Russian regime (though that also applies to the American regime, as the owners of autistici.org found out, though .org has always been American and .su was non-Russian for about 15 months).
The real class action case is that the huge stream of money flow is not cashing in Europe at all, not a cent. Who the f owns the infrastructure? If I buy a domain from and in Europe the money got to stay in Europe.
The real class action is the issue of a fascist government declaring antifascism terrorism, making all bank transfers void, seizing their domain (.org). They could do the same to ICC and ICJ, or anyone they dislike really. Most root-servers are located in America, too.
That some company is behind .com or some TLD and earning some money with that is a nothingburger.
Operators for gTLDs specifically .com .org .net serve large bases and operate under extensive contractual obligations, which can constrain arbitrary targeted enforcement. Than, some ccTLDs that have weaker mechanisms for appeal, leaving registrars and registrants exposed to discretionary decisions by the ccTLD operator or relevant national authorities
I'm curious. That's the class action from US residents. Would this thing effectively force Verisign to overcharge those purchasing .com domains from outside of the US (while lowering the price for those inside the US)?
My best guess: prices stay where they are, or will raise as Verisign pleases in the following decades, and the US customers receive a laughably small refund for their domains after a decade long case settled outside of court after especially lawyers earned their golden noses.
Aren't we close to decentralised domains or some sort of easy and open web indentifiers? But I think whatever we go for there are always middle-entities (aka middlemen). Crypto, and everything else. The choice comes down to either having to something like a SHA256 hash as an identifier or pay somone and then also get controlled by that someone and then with that comes the whole charade and laundry list of potential problems. That's why classic domains stuck around. Everything is a hassle and controlled, so go with something that is actually established.
Same goes for payment methods. I recently tried to buy some crypto to pay for (legally) at some "legit" sites like openrouter. I gave up after 2-3 days. Tried exchanges in my own country and also some famous non-local ones that are legally compliant to operate in my country and goodness it was a clusterfuck of darkpatterns and nightmare of steps and waits and locks and what not. I finally just created a temp card on my banking app with tiny credit spend limits and got done with it.
We attack the wrrong problems. Like "make it decentralised"! The thing is the decentralised immediately becomes centralised for any meaningful usage and often much worse and slower and in some cases costlier. Imho, we should rather work for "make them accountable" and the accountability should be decentralised to different countries and eventually to people. But then this happens via Govts and even the ones that are actually elected by people don't like to give such powers into the hands of the people and lose contorl.
Tor is great for this, as long as you're willing to put up with very long domain names, a mild amount of stigmatization, and an extra software requirement for visitors.
I really hope VeriSign will lose this battle, it will serve as a lesson to this awful company. VerSign is vampirizing the internet. They hold a very important power on the whole infrastructure and they are the opposite of a good steward. The third-level .name fiasco [1] in itself should have led the ICANN to stop working with VeriSign and give their TLD management to other actors, ideally non-profit structures. Instead of that the ICANN let them go with it based on the flat out lies VeriSign wrote in their request, and denied requests for reconsideration based on the same lies. So maybe this class-action in justice is the only way to get through to VeriShit.
I don't think Verisign is above doing these kinds of financial crimes, but until the lawsuit has been won, nothing is proven. Plus, the lawsuit will most likely be settled if the allegations are true, rather than actually applying the law; class action lawyers are in it for the money, after all, not for enacting justice.
The internet needs an independent tld that’s not controlled by any entity, I see a lot of people over selling self hosting as the ultimate freedom, and while it’s great and better than relying in saas, you are still under the mercy of some entity and have a single point of failure in your setup. And before someone chimes in, onion aren’t practical.
You do not. Tor browser is just a browser and proxy baked together for convenience. You can use any proxy and any browser you want.
Actually, tor is also not browser centric at all either. It does TCP (if not more), so any protocol will do. Proxy is typically a SOCKS interface IIRC, so any client will often do as well.
Between memorable, decentralized, and secure, you can choose at most two.
I am fine with not having memorable names, as long as the tooling is right. For the most part, I don't type domain names by hand. I use bookmarks, copy and paste links, navigate websites, scan QR codes, ...
There are several decentralized schemes where the identifier is cryptographically bound to a private key, none of which I can use in my browser.
Since a majority of people use a handful of public DNS resolvers anyways, these resolvers could deploy split DNS for a special-use domain, let's say ".did" (short for decentralized identity), and resolve this special TLD differently. This way people do not need special software to access websites on a ".did" domain.
Maybe DNSSEC could be mandatory and your domain name is the key digest from the DS record, although this prevents key rotation while maintaining a stable domain name.
>Verisign’s financial filings indicate it costs Verisign approximately $3 per domain to operate .com domains
to maintain a few hundred bytes in a database small enough to be served from a computer from the 90s?
Most of the costs to provide digital services are salaries for the employees. You need engineers, support staff, lawyers, and some supporting roles like finance and security/compliance to meet the legal and contractual obligations of the service.
Sure, but remember that Verisign manages a total of 179 million domains. They also have less than 1,000 employees. Can they really have a salary cost of >$530K per employee? It's obviously the executive team that pockets most of that cost.
Welcome to the wonderful world of corporate overhead and inefficiencies.
...$530K cost to employ is actually not unheard of for a US based software company, actually. (i.e. including office space, equipment, healthcare, benfits and corporate taxes). Maybe slightly on the high side though.
Obviously is not aware of the bonus system in America.
Fyi overhead often add anything up to 100% to the basic salary cost. Office space, hiring, travel, various forms of insurance, these things add up.
And serving DNS for the root or a big zone is technically challenging. You want 100% uptime despite DDoS attacks, that's not simple.
I wonder how much those operating costs would fall if you slashed salaries in half for all executives earning more than 4 million a year?
Or replace them with AI
.de costs me 1,14 € per year for comparison (using Netcup). Denic is also non-profit.
This whole case seems to hinge on the argument that .com domains somehow constitute their own market, instead of being just part of wider domain name market with plenty of competing registrys. That might prove difficult argument in court.
It’s not just Verisign on .com; the entire gTLD system is corrupt (ccTLDs vary). .org and .info are probably even clearer examples.
I have wondered at times whether gTLDs were a mistake and everything should have been under ccTLDs.
ccTLDs have their own problems, many of them have been effectively privatized and are operated just like gTLDs.
One particular weird example would be the Bulgarian .bg TLD: https://eualternative.eu/guides/bulgaria-bg-private-registry...
This is actually a part of the reason why I wonder whether gTLDs were a mistake. You end up with monsters like the (offensively-named) private equity firm “Ethos Capital” who have indulged in typical private-equity behaviour and what I will call credibly-alleged corruption, in order to take over more and more of the domain name registration system, and exploit it where they can (e.g. .info rates are I think more than triple what they were when I registered in 2008, where .com has gone up by only something like 10%).
The story of .org price caps and the Ethos Capital sale, where sanity prevailed in about nine tenths of one of the two cases (Ethos Capital didn’t get to buy .org, but they do operate it), shows some of these issues.
I just wonder if, in the absence of gTLDs which it can own, with only ccTLDs to operate, Afilias might not have become the monster it did.
I am naive for hoping things might have turned out better, but… maybe.
gTLDs at least have some minimal level of accountability and security standards.
ccTLDs are at the whim of the country. If you went with the '.su' ccTLD from the soviet union some years back, well, that would have been quite unfortunate.
Legally I feel like they're also worse. Like, say you're an abortion clinic operating in the regressive country of the US, and you get a '.us' ccTLD, surely it's more likely the government outlaws abortions and censors your domain via the registrar than if you used a '.com'?
I believe you made the wrong example using US, since gTLD like ".com" are de facto controlled also by US companies.
If we instead take another country, like Italy, the reasoning would be sound. If Italian governament bans abortions in Italy, it's more likely that the auhtorities are able to restrict the sites registered on .it than .com
Yes. I believe the Italian government would need to seek cooperation through diplomatic channels to shut down .com domains.
.com and most of the other traditional gTLDs should probably be considered equivalent to .us for legal issues.
> If you went with the '.su' ccTLD from the soviet union some years back, well, that would have been quite unfortunate.
.su is still being operated. Still being sold, even. How bad .su is for you depends on how friendly you are with the current Russian regime (though that also applies to the American regime, as the owners of autistici.org found out, though .org has always been American and .su was non-Russian for about 15 months).
The real class action case is that the huge stream of money flow is not cashing in Europe at all, not a cent. Who the f owns the infrastructure? If I buy a domain from and in Europe the money got to stay in Europe.
The real class action is the issue of a fascist government declaring antifascism terrorism, making all bank transfers void, seizing their domain (.org). They could do the same to ICC and ICJ, or anyone they dislike really. Most root-servers are located in America, too.
That some company is behind .com or some TLD and earning some money with that is a nothingburger.
Operators for gTLDs specifically .com .org .net serve large bases and operate under extensive contractual obligations, which can constrain arbitrary targeted enforcement. Than, some ccTLDs that have weaker mechanisms for appeal, leaving registrars and registrants exposed to discretionary decisions by the ccTLD operator or relevant national authorities
I'm curious. That's the class action from US residents. Would this thing effectively force Verisign to overcharge those purchasing .com domains from outside of the US (while lowering the price for those inside the US)?
Yes, same question here from my end, if anyone can answer. I had purchased some during those time frame here in EU. How does that work?
My best guess: prices stay where they are, or will raise as Verisign pleases in the following decades, and the US customers receive a laughably small refund for their domains after a decade long case settled outside of court after especially lawyers earned their golden noses.
Aren't we close to decentralised domains or some sort of easy and open web indentifiers? But I think whatever we go for there are always middle-entities (aka middlemen). Crypto, and everything else. The choice comes down to either having to something like a SHA256 hash as an identifier or pay somone and then also get controlled by that someone and then with that comes the whole charade and laundry list of potential problems. That's why classic domains stuck around. Everything is a hassle and controlled, so go with something that is actually established.
Same goes for payment methods. I recently tried to buy some crypto to pay for (legally) at some "legit" sites like openrouter. I gave up after 2-3 days. Tried exchanges in my own country and also some famous non-local ones that are legally compliant to operate in my country and goodness it was a clusterfuck of darkpatterns and nightmare of steps and waits and locks and what not. I finally just created a temp card on my banking app with tiny credit spend limits and got done with it.
We attack the wrrong problems. Like "make it decentralised"! The thing is the decentralised immediately becomes centralised for any meaningful usage and often much worse and slower and in some cases costlier. Imho, we should rather work for "make them accountable" and the accountability should be decentralised to different countries and eventually to people. But then this happens via Govts and even the ones that are actually elected by people don't like to give such powers into the hands of the people and lose contorl.
Tor is great for this, as long as you're willing to put up with very long domain names, a mild amount of stigmatization, and an extra software requirement for visitors.
I really hope VeriSign will lose this battle, it will serve as a lesson to this awful company. VerSign is vampirizing the internet. They hold a very important power on the whole infrastructure and they are the opposite of a good steward. The third-level .name fiasco [1] in itself should have led the ICANN to stop working with VeriSign and give their TLD management to other actors, ideally non-profit structures. Instead of that the ICANN let them go with it based on the flat out lies VeriSign wrote in their request, and denied requests for reconsideration based on the same lies. So maybe this class-action in justice is the only way to get through to VeriShit.
[1] https://p4bl0.net/post/2026/10/VeriSign-is-VeriShit
I just renewed domain name I own for maybe 20+ years, for $23/yr. This is nuts.
who's your registrar? that sounds like GoDaddy levels of pricing.
Cloudflare, porkbun and others can get you a .com for $10-$11/yr
GoDaddy.
FWIW Cloudflare sells domains at near cost, $10.46 for a .com domain currently.
doesn't mean much when you're forced to use their namesevers. this only applies if you're willing to be tied to CF
they're a nightmare to deal with if you ever have problems. I'd transfer out
Cumulative inflation in the US since 2021 has been around 25%? 30% if counting since 2020.
I've always hypothesized this was going on. It'll be interesting to see the results.
No results yet, just allegations.
I don't think Verisign is above doing these kinds of financial crimes, but until the lawsuit has been won, nothing is proven. Plus, the lawsuit will most likely be settled if the allegations are true, rather than actually applying the law; class action lawyers are in it for the money, after all, not for enacting justice.
The internet needs an independent tld that’s not controlled by any entity, I see a lot of people over selling self hosting as the ultimate freedom, and while it’s great and better than relying in saas, you are still under the mercy of some entity and have a single point of failure in your setup. And before someone chimes in, onion aren’t practical.
Are you saying onion isn't practical, or Tor isn't practical? They're not the same thing.
Considering you usually need Tor Browser to access onion, are those really so different?
You do not. Tor browser is just a browser and proxy baked together for convenience. You can use any proxy and any browser you want.
Actually, tor is also not browser centric at all either. It does TCP (if not more), so any protocol will do. Proxy is typically a SOCKS interface IIRC, so any client will often do as well.
That was the idea behind namecoin. But they screwed up their pricing and died.
Between memorable, decentralized, and secure, you can choose at most two. I am fine with not having memorable names, as long as the tooling is right. For the most part, I don't type domain names by hand. I use bookmarks, copy and paste links, navigate websites, scan QR codes, ...
There are several decentralized schemes where the identifier is cryptographically bound to a private key, none of which I can use in my browser. Since a majority of people use a handful of public DNS resolvers anyways, these resolvers could deploy split DNS for a special-use domain, let's say ".did" (short for decentralized identity), and resolve this special TLD differently. This way people do not need special software to access websites on a ".did" domain.
Maybe DNSSEC could be mandatory and your domain name is the key digest from the DS record, although this prevents key rotation while maintaining a stable domain name.
seems commensurate with inflation
fees have a PoW/PoS function, too cheap a fee will cause spam and squatting.
let’s be real, 10$/yr is less than 1$/month, .com domains are cheap
Great, I'm going to get a check for $0.01! Totally worth the millions the lawyers will get.