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.
I really hope VeriSign will lose this battle, it will serve as a lesson to this awful company. This company 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.
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
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.
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
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.
to maintain a few hundred bytes in a database small enough to be served from a computer from the 90s?
And serving DNS for the root or a big zone is technically challenging. You want 100% uptime despite DDoS attacks, that's not simple.
[1] https://p4bl0.net/post/2026/10/VeriSign-is-VeriShit
I have wondered at times whether gTLDs were a mistake and everything should have been under ccTLDs.
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'?
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
.com and most of the other traditional gTLDs should probably be considered equivalent to .us for legal issues.
One particular weird example would be the Bulgarian .bg TLD: https://eualternative.eu/guides/bulgaria-bg-private-registry...
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.
That some company is behind .com or some TLD and earning some money with that is a nothingburger.
Cloudflare, porkbun and others can get you a .com for $10-$11/yr
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.