US senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and congressman Jerry Nadler of New York have called on government bodies to investigate what they allege is the "predatory pricing" of .com web addresses, the internet's prime real estate.
In a letter delivered today to the Department of Justice and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a branch of the Department of Commerce that advises the president, the two Democrats accuse VeriSign, the company that administers the .com top-level domain, of abusing its market dominance to overcharge customers.
In 2018, under the Donald Trump administration, the NTIA modified the terms on how much VeriSign could charge for .com domains. The company has since hiked prices by 30 percent, the letter claims, though its service remains identical and could allegedly be provided far more cheaply by others.
"VeriSign is exploiting its monopoly power to charge millions of users excessive prices for registering a .com top-level domain," the letter claims. "VeriSign hasn't changed or improved its services; it has simply raised prices because it holds a government-ensured monopoly."
VeriSign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in an August blog post entitled "Setting the Record Straight," the company claimed that discourse around its management of .com had been "distorted by factual inaccuracies, a misunderstanding of core technical concepts, and misinterpretations regarding pricing, competition, and market dynamics in the domain name industry."
In the same blog post, the company argues that it is not operating a monopoly because there are 1,200 generic top-level domains operated by other entities, including .org, .shop, .ai, and .uk.
[...] The letter claims that separate agreements with the NTIA and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit established by the Commerce Department to oversee the web's domain name system, have allowed VeriSign to establish monopoly power. The former sets how much the company can charge its customers for registering .com addresses, while the latter assigns VeriSign as the "sole operator" of the .com domain. The letter also alleges that VeriSign might be in violation of the Sherman Act.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday November 26, @10:52AM (14 children)
One way to end VeriSign is ditch the whole hierarchical name domain system. No more "businessname.com", it'd just be "businessname". Computer scientists have been too much in love with hierarchy.
Our file systems are all organized with directories and subdirectories. That's great for the computer -- until the user runs a bunch of searches to find a few files. It's not so good for users. Now we even have search services that go through all the files on a system. The first time my Linux installation ran the new slocate indexing, it was something like 3 in the morning, and I was asleep. The noise of the sudden spike in disk activity woke me up, and my first thought was that some hack was in progress or some virus was at work. Slocate was too inefficient, and was replaced with mlocate a few years later. On the Windows side, a few times I've had to disable their indexing that was somehow stuck, constantly thrashing the drive and CPU to the point the computer was unusably slow. That said, our computers are fast enough now that we don't have to coddle them with a hierarchical directory structure any more, we could instead use tags.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday November 26, @11:53AM
Hierarchical design is useful for humans too: That's why, in the bad old days of paper records, a lot of information was kept in labelled folders, sometimes with labelled sections, in labelled drawers or labelled shelves.
Of course, you have to have enough discipline to put things where they should go, but once you do that it makes retrieval a lot faster.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Nuke on Tuesday November 26, @01:36PM (5 children)
That's your take. But I use a hierarchical structure for my files for my own sake. Some of us are organised by nature. It never even occurred to me that I was doing it for the computer's sake, and don't see how it is anyway.
So if I want to pull up my record of when I last changed my car engine oil, from the file manager (which is open all the time) I go to Cars -> Volvo -> Maintenance and one of the three or four files there is called volvo_log.odt. I get there and have it open in five clicks including the one to bring the file manager to the screen. Seeing the related files in the directory also serves to remind me of what other useful related files are there, for example there is a list of local car dealers and the car handbook is there too. What is the advantage of tags supposed to be?
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Tuesday November 26, @01:45PM (1 child)
You don't write the mileage/date on the filter? Or put a sticker in the upper left-hand corner of your windshield?
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26, @09:00PM
I drive so few miles that my oil/filter change reminder is the annual state inspection...seems like a good idea to change the oil once a year to get any water (condensation) out of the engine.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday November 26, @01:59PM (2 children)
With tags, you would not have to remember the order. Why do you not have it "Maintenance->Cars->Volvo"? Cars are not the only things that need maintenance. Where would you put Appliances, in the root alongside Cars? And your Home? If you had Maintenance at the top level, Appliances and Home could be a subdirectory of Maintenance. But then of course other aspects of these things would be scattered around the hierarchy. Maybe you also have "Cars->Volvo->Financing"? And travel records? Documentation? Tags would allow you more flexibility. You wouldn't be forced to assign files and directories levels and positions within the directory hierarchy.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Snotnose on Tuesday November 26, @03:12PM (1 child)
With tags, you or someone has to create the tags. And heaven forbid different people use different tags for similar things.
As an example, before I got Plex I never tagged my MP3 files. They were all /Music/artist/album, with the filename being the song title. Then I got Plex and was suddenly looking at "Unknown artist. Unknown album. Unknown song". Dafuq Plex?
I read Plex had an option to use folders, but that option doesn't exist on my Plex (running on a Raspberry Pi).
It's just a fact of life that people with brains the size of grapes have mouths the size of watermelons. -- Aunty Acid
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Tuesday November 26, @04:06PM
Which is why I always hated iTunes. I already had a hierarchy ( /Music/artist/album) like you, although when ripping all my CDs back (with CDex [wikipedia.org] -- Warning recent versions may be compromised!) in the '90s, it had integration with CDDB [wikipedia.org] and would add automagically add mp3 tags.
However, that was (and is) imperfect and significantly prone to error.
As such, using a folder hierarchy was (and still is) superior to having a separate database (ala iTunes) to organize such files, as the folder structure *is* the DB index.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Insightful) by stormreaver on Tuesday November 26, @02:40PM (3 children)
Hierarchical filesystems have never been for the computer's sake. They make the computer do more work to find a file, not less. A computer would be faster with a flat, presorted filesystem, as searching through a sorted list is much faster than traversing a tree.
Hierarchical filesystems exist to make life easier for humans, as our brains want to categorize things. Additionally, hierarchical filesystems can reduce or eliminate namespace collisions. A human makes more sense of "nature/leaf/stats.txt" and "cars/leaf/stats.txt" as opposed to "18g9bbae5d94g753a842" and "887ddbd9aa449dfgd9df".
User-defined tags sound cool at first blush, but they would slow down file resolutions far more than a hierarchical filesystem. At least with a hierarchical filesystem, each step along the path is unique and deterministic. A tag-based system could never be guaranteed to resolve to one and only one file. Say you tagged 3 files as "leaf", 50 files with "leaf" and "car", and 75 files with "leaf" and "car" and "nissan" and "electric". How do you tell the computer which file you want? If you specify just "leaf", you get 128 possibilities. If you specify "leaf" and "car", you get 125 possibilities. If you specify "leaf" and "car" and "nissan" and "electric", you've created a far less efficient hierarchical filesystem.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday November 26, @02:52PM
ISTM that searching a sorted list and searching a balanced tree should have the same O() value. And with the tree not all entries need to be the same size. Of course, that's not the kind of hierarchy being discussed when one talks about the ".com" domain.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday November 26, @09:53PM (1 child)
> Hierarchical filesystems have never been for the computer's sake. They make the computer do more work to find a file, not less.
More work? Why, no, I think not. Ever hear of the problems it causes when a user places a ridiculous number of files in one directory? Like, 100,000 files in one directory?
Also, the work involved depends greatly on the particular file system. In XFS, deleting a large directory tree can be very slow. In FAT, everything is slow.
> User-defined tags sound cool at first blush, but they would slow down file resolutions far more than a hierarchical filesystem.
Did you just write that hierarchy is in fact for the computer's sake? Hierarchical, not tags, because the computer is faster at accessing hierarchically organized data?
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Wednesday November 27, @12:22AM
No.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 27, @10:15AM (2 children)
...until you realize that directories are just tags. I don't see your point exactly.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday November 28, @04:11AM (1 child)
A directory tree imposes an order. Tags don't.
This order can be useful, but it can also be a hindrance. The only way to have a file within 2 directories is for one directory to be inside the other. Symbolic links are often used as a bandaid when that is not useful. Think of the messiness of having directories /bin, /usr/bin, /sbin. and /usr/sbin. Had to repeat the names "bin" and "sbin". With tags, this repetition is no longer needed to work around the limitations of using a directory tree.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Thursday November 28, @09:41AM
This only depends on how you use them. Conceptually tags are a subset of directory structure, so they are nothing new, different, or of added value. Your proposal is use a "flatter" structure. You have it already.
(Score: 4, Troll) by VLM on Tuesday November 26, @01:10PM (2 children)
https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ [usinflationcalculator.com]
The above site ALWAYS estimates low for whatever political etc reasons. However, input 2018 as start year, and the "cumulative rate of inflation" is reported as 25.7% So the monopoly is ripping off the customers to the tune of ... 4% over six years, if you use the fake artificially low data.
According to google, also untrustworthy, the average price of eggs in 2018 was $1.74 and in 2024 is around $3.37 so if the "real" rate of inflation over that time was 93% and the monopoly only increased prices 30%, that's pretty good! The hypercompetitive egg market increased prices 93% so you'd expect a monopoly would do worse...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26, @04:24PM
lol! yeah guys, don't hurt anyone's feelz by saying something factual like "under the Donald Trump administration". biden and obama, however, are fair game for reasons.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26, @05:17PM
If every reference to the executive branch is something like
"Joe blow, spokesperson for the (TDS deleted) administration says that using (TDS deleted)'s name is a sign of TDS."
When asked, "What is TDS?" Joe replied, "Nice try! (TDS deleted) will hear about this and you'll be banned from the press corps!"
A spokesperson for the the (TDS deleted) administration excoriated news anchor Barnum Bailey for their brazen use of the term (TDS deleted) administration.
Jackass.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nuke on Tuesday November 26, @01:12PM
I am in the UK and when I am looking for eg a plumber or an on-line shop I deliberately avoid any that have a .com domain. That is because they could be anywhere in the world, and in fact are usually in the USA. Yet I have known small local companies to have a .com website, posturing as if they are a multi-national giant.
Ironically, multi-national giants like Google and Microsoft have national domains (in addition to the .com one of course) in an attempt to look friendly, local and accesssible.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fliptop on Tuesday November 26, @01:53PM
The domains I manage are all registered through name.com. In the late 90's, before other registrars came about, registering a domain required buying it from NetSol for $75 (IIRC, that was the cost). Now, there's a lot of registrars that a domain can be purchased from. Is the issue what these registrars are charged by Verisign? I just checked and name.com is charging $17.99 to renew a .com domain for one year. That doesn't seem excessive to me.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday November 26, @03:02PM
How much does it actually cost VeriSlime to register and maintain a .com domain name?
Santa maintains a database and does double verification of it.
(Score: 2) by Frosty Piss on Tuesday November 26, @06:35PM (1 child)
Just don't use them. Bought my first domain there, but TuCows and others took their place.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday November 26, @09:41PM
Except that Tucows has to pay Verisign to add your domain to the .com DNS root. So you do end up paying them, just indirectly.
The way DNS currently works, ICANN is a monopoly that auctions off control of top-level domains (TLDs) to other monopolies, who then make their money back by having anyone who wants a domain name in their TLD having to pay them.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin