> 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.