[article - and don't judge it based on the headline please] Special Investigation: The Dirty Secret Behind Warren Buffett=?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=99s_?=Billions

[Ayden Férdeline]

Special Investigation: The Dirty Secret Behind Warren Buffett’s Billions
America’s favorite investor loves monopoly, not free markets.
https://www.thenation.com/article/special-investigation-the-dirty-secret-behind-warren-buffetts-billions/

"The company is called Verisign ... As of September 2017, two of Verisign’s domain-name registries, the aforementioned .com and .net, accounted for 145.8 million of the 330.7 million websites in existence, or nearly one in two. Take away the 144.7 million sites tied to a specific country (like .us, or .cn for China), and it’s more like four out of five. Any company controlling 80 percent of a given market can safely be termed a monopoly, though a spokesperson for Verisign said in a statement that “we believe competition is thriving in the market.” The nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the registry industry’s main regulator, granted Verisign exclusive contracts to operate .com and .net. Verisign can automatically renew the contracts as long as it meets certain performance metrics. The company was also initially permitted to raise prices gradually, despite the fact that the costs of managing a registry decline over time because the necessary infrastructure is already established. “If you’re giving a near monopoly in an industry where prices are falling, you would think that you would have terms in the contract to lower the price,” said economist Dean Baker, a critic of government-granted monopolies. Instead, prices for .net domain names can rise 10 percent per year; they’ve more than doubled since 2005, from $3.50 to $9.02 (Verisign’s statement called this price “lower than most competing legacy [top-level domains]”). Prices for .com domain names have also risen, though they are now frozen at $7.85 per year, due to an amended contract executed in 2012. Competitors have offered to run registries at significantly cheaper rates, yet ICANN hasn’t altered Verisign’s contract terms."

— Ayden
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