Verisign .com Domain Name Registry Consumer Class Action | Hacker News Reader

Verisign .com Domain Name Registry Consumer Class Action

hbsslaw.com

114 pointsgreyface-71 comments

>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.

True. I'm not aware of a $500K+ bonus system for "engineers, support staff, lawyers, and some supporting roles like finance and security/compliance" in America.

My guy, SWE ICs are making high six to low seven figure annual TCs nowadays in SF. Not exaggerating. RSUs and ESPPs be crazy these last couple of years.

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.

>a database small enough to be served from a computer from the 90s?

Putting ~170 million .com records into a RDBMS on a 90s computer is not enough infrastructure to serve ~746 billion DNS queries a day : https://www.verisign.com/about-us/

They don't use off-the-shelf Redis/PostgreSQL/MySQL and they have more uptime reliability than Github, AWS us-east-1, Anthropic Claude, etc.

Verisign may still overcharge for what they do but nevertheless, the computing infrastructure isn't trivial.

>746 billion DNS queries a day

shieet. does every damn intermediate DNS in the world have a 15-second cache TTL for .com's or something?

but still, serving 746000000000/(24*60*60)=8634259 requests/s of very light plaintext only requires a server rack or two these days. not a whole datacenter. https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&tes...

so even with redundancy and onsite engineers around the clock, their margins are obscene.

>> 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?

I don't like them, but they obviously have more than server operation costs. You can't really look at any business system like you did.

In the 90s I did not have enough RAM to serve com.zone on a personal computer

I only served a (custom) root.zone. It was tiny compared to today's root.zone filled with garbage TLDs and "security" theater. This file is soon to explode in size once again

Today I can serve com.zone. The computers I own have relatively modest specs

This lawsuit will settle, probably before discovery, but possibly we may learn a few things from the pleadings

NB. I only serve these zones to myself. For me it's faster and more reliable. In remote DNS outages I don't notice any disruption

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.

Tbh the .bg situation seems rather internal problem in Bulgaria rather than problem in the system. As the article mentions, governments definitely can get control of their tld if they want to, so the problem here seems to be that Bulgaria isn't interested.

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.

They don't need to seek cooperation, they can order domestic blocks and come after the registrar's operations in Italy.

> 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).

Very bad example: If your business is outlawed, that why is it a problem if the domain of the then illegal business is also censored? It is basically an expected outcome.

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'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.

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.

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

Cool words which apply if you are in USA. If you are not in USA, the Trump administration demonstrated you are better off with a domain of your country (usually a ccTLD).

Then buy domain operated by european registry?

Sure, but the final destination of the money flow is the same ICANN, which apparently need to give "Accreditations"/affiliation to the franchise. I remind you that the infrastructure is 100% European, this is purely idiotic from the European side.

In general icann fees are fairly small fraction of the overall cost of a domain, most of the money ends to registrars and registrys.

That´s is not the point. The monopoly is the whole point. Would you pay tax to India or China because the sunlight shines in your country every day? Who owns the sun!

You are perfectly free to run your own root servers

Don´t you worry about it, We already do. That do not solve the bigger issue yet, but the alert was sent, so be happy :)

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

> Instead of that the ICANN let them go with it based on the flat out lies VeriSign wrote in their request

Unfortunately, I’m not sure if there are actually any lies in their request <https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/consensus-policies/rsep-2...>.

To begin with, the form is really not well-applicable to such requests, but is nonetheless the process that gets used for such things.

Partly because of that, and partly because there are specific meanings of things in the field, there are various things that look like lies, but which aren’t actually. Saying “there will not be any effect on the life cycle of domain names” in §2.1, for example, is technically true: it doesn’t change the life cycle of domain-names-as-a-category, it just deletes a bunch of names (which you could describe as affecting their life cycles!) and removes a category of possible names from registration.

There are also things like §3.6, “Have you communicated with any of the entities whose products or services might be affected by the introduction of your proposed service?” where they just said “no”. (I think most people’s idea that there were lies springs from this section, and misunderstanding that the two sentences of the answer are responding to the two questions; they’re not saying that communicating with people is not applicable.) Irresponsible, and an obvious eyebrow-raiser, but presumably true. My biggest complaint on technicalities would be in §6.2 where they said they consulted with “a select group of registrars comprising a majority of the user base”… whereas I’d consider the registrants to be the user base, and they have said they didn’t consult with them.

§5.1 is perhaps the most ridiculous to me, though, when they say “yeah, our contract says we have to do third-level registrations, we’ll talk about removing that from the contract after discontinuing them”. Probably a part of the procedure, given how they word things, but ludicrous all the same.

They’re also definitely incapable of following instructions. In §5.1 when instructed to write “N/A” they wrote “Not applicable”, and in §7.3 when instructed to write “N/A.” they wrote “None.”

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.

Yeah, that’s not practical, if you can’t access a certain tld without using a special network, then you lost the purpose of having it in the first place. onion needs tor network, browser or not, plus the horrendous name too. A practical convenient tld is where you use any browser on any internet connected device to type a human readable name.

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.

Yep, I agree, that’s actually a good approach, and the resolving happens by a trusted entity say FSF or similar mechanism. It’s doable but I think the internet didn’t yet grasp the concept that all their infrastructure and resources are technically still heavily centralized by few entities, you can have a fully on prem setup with all “sovereign” policies and all, then your recourses go offline because that one entity controlling the tld been asked to do so by the government where that entity is.

Nice! I signed up! I hope more class action lawsuit are brought up about the greedy registrars who are abusing their monopolies! And, finally, a class action lawsuit against ICANN, which legitimizes these monopolies, and, I won't be surprised, its decision makers get payments under the table for the vastly profitable redemption, and "deleted" domains aftermarket!

Imagine you fail to pay your cellphone bill, which is much higher per year than a domain renewal, and then your operator puts your number on auction and your competitors buys it and start taking your clients' calls.

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

Thank you! Looking into this now.

they're a nightmare to deal with if you ever have problems. I'd transfer out

Are you sure it's 20 years? I don't think selling more than the registry max limit (10 years) is allowed by the registry-registrar agreement. Also you should never renew for the max period, because you lock yourself in with your current registrar for at least a year (to transfer your domain name to another registrar you need to be able to renew it for at least 1 year, which you can't do if you renewed for 10 years). Being locked in with a registrar can be risky

They are saying they have owned the domain for more than 20 years, presumably paying much less than 23$/yr during that time. Now they renewed their ownership and they find the price exorbitant.

I did not know about the requirement about being able to renew the domain for transfers, I was considering buying a .com for a long duration but maybe I'll hold off on that.

You can buy a .com for a long duration, just don’t make it 10 years. 8 or 9 years is plenty, and gives you room to transfer out if needed.

Thanks, yes, I own the domain for 20+ years, but pay yearly renewals.

I never really had any issues w/ GoDaddy, but am looking to change to Cloudflare now. I don't understand what am I paying $20+ for.

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.

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.

Cumulative inflation in the US since 2021 has been around 25%? 30% if counting since 2020.

I'm curious how this will go in practice. Verisign's monopoly over the .com domain is granted by an agreement between Verisign and the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The agreement regulates pricing of .com domains, but the price controls determine how quickly Verisign can raise its prices rather than requiring prices to reflect the actual cost of operating the domain registry. The wholesale .com price was frozen at $7.85 for years, but in 2018 the NTIA decided to let Verisign start raising the prices. When the agreement was signed, the NTIA released this statement https://www.ntia.gov/press-release/2018/ntia-statement-amend... :

> NTIA and Verisign have agreed to extend and modify the Cooperative Agreement. These modifications are in line with policy priorities of the Trump Administration. The changes create a new commitment to content neutrality in the Domain Name System (DNS), provide market-based pricing flexibility, and reduce the regulatory burden on Verisign.

> Amendment 35 confirms that Verisign will operate the .com registry in a content neutral manner with a commitment to participate in ICANN processes. To that end, NTIA looks forward to working with Verisign and other ICANN stakeholders in the coming year on trusted notifier programs to provide transparency and accountability in the .com top level domain.

> 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. Specifically, the flexibility permits Verisign to pursue with ICANN an up to 7 percent increase in the prices for .com domain names, in each of the last four years of the six-year term of the .com Registry Agreement. The changes also affirm that Verisign may not vertically integrate or operate as a registrar in the .com top level domain.

In 2024, the NTIA announced that it had renewed its agreement with Verisign. Their statement said that the NTIA believed that lower .com prices would be in the public interest, but were unable to reach an agreement with Verisign on pricing https://www.ntia.gov/blog/2024/com-cooperative-agreement-ens... .

The reason why the NTIA were no longer able to limit wholesale .com pricing was due to the 2018 amendment to the .com contract basically removing all negotiating leverage the NTIA had over Verisign. The amendment included provisions that made the agreement automatically renew every six years unless the NTIA gave timely notice of nonrenewal (so if the two sides couldn't reach an agreement it would continue in its current form), and allowing Verisign to continue operating the .com TLD even if the agreement was terminated.

The plaintiffs will have to prove that Verisign was acting unlawfully despite its prices being explicitly permitted by its arrangements with the US government. They'll also have to prove that they even have grounds to sue, when the Illinois Brick doctrine establishes that indirect purchasers of goods/services can't seek damages for antitrust violations. In this case, this means that the end domain purchasers may be unable to sue because they purchased their domains from registrars rather than directly from Verisign.

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