Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. Recently here in the United States, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressman Jerry Nadler have called for an investigation into a company called VeriSign. So why did they do that? Well, they say that VeriSign has engaged in predatory pricing their words. And what is VeriSign's business, Well, among other things, vera sign is the one and only entity acting as a registry for some top level domain names, and we're going to break all that down so that it's easier to parse. But let me preface this by saying this is complicated stuff, not just technically, but from like an organizational perspective. This is really complex and there's gonna be a lot of talk about the responsibilities of a registry in this episode and how things have kind of shifted around since the days of arpenet into the Internet. So what I'm saying is that there's a lot more to this than what I'm going to cover. In fact, I'm not even going to get into things like the DNS wars or the Root Registry wars, or any of that stuff, because it would require a full series of episodes all by themselves. So if what I'm talking about today is interesting to you and you want to learn more, let me tell you there is a wealth of information online. You can just do some searching around for things like DNS wars, for example, and learn all about how people were trying to establish standards in price. This is, you know, before you actually arrive at standards and practices, it can be a little bit like the wild West out there, and that was certainly the case with early organization of information on the Internet infrastructure. But let's talk about devices and names now. The naming of computers is a difficult matter. It isn't just one of your holiday games. You may think at first, I'm as mad as a hatter when I tell you a computer as a name that's really a bunch of numbers. You know. I was really going to try and channel ts Elliott through the whole episode, but it kind of fell off quickly there, So I guess there goes my chance of having this episode be turned into a musical by Androloid Weber. But yeah, in the early days of arpinnet, when a bunch of computer scientists were kind of sussing out how to create a system in which different computers would be able to communicate with one another and send and receive files and all that kind of stuff. One of the many challenges required that each computer have a unique name or address assigned to it. Otherwise you would have to rely on maybe a direct computer to computer connection to send information from computer A to computer B. And that works if you're just talking about two computers. Right, If you just need to directly connect two machines together, no big deal. I mean, it is a big deal. But you could do that. You could create a physical connection and create standards that would allow one computer to talk to another. Keep in mind, different computers communicate in very different ways, so you'd have to kind of build a translator in on either side so that the computers could understand the information being sent back and forth. But more than that, if you add more computers to this, so that you don't just have computer A and B, but you have C through Z and then all the numbers, well you get into a system that's far more complicated. Right. You can't just directly connect Computer A to all five thousand other machines that are on the network. That would be impossible. You would just have a massive cables that would be a real tripping hazard if nothing else, Plus where would you plug them all into. So sooner or later, you're going to have a huge mess on your hands that needs to be solved through some other means. And thus it makes more sense to create an infrastructure in which each computer has a unique name or address. So if Computer one wants to talk to Computer five hundred, will both computers have their own unique addresses, and that facilitates this connection between the two, so that Computer one is communicating only with Computer five hundred and not just blasting out information to four hundred ninety nine machines only one of which actually is relevant. You don't want it to be a party line. So those unique addresses would allow this to happen. And computers two through four hundred ninety nine plus anything above five hundred one or five oh one. And further, none of those are going to accidentally get the information meant to just go between these other two computers one in five hundred. So I'm not going to dwell too much on the old NCP days. NCP stands for Network Control Protocol. That is a topic that will require a deeper dive in itself in order to talk about network infrastructure. But it's a predecessor to what we have today. So instead, let's turn our attention to an approach that would succeed the old NCP rules, and that would be TCP IP. We usually write that as TCP slash IP. These are two sets of rules that are the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet protocol. Remember, protocol is really just a fancy word to say rule set. This is the process, the rules that you follow in order to achieve whatever the thing is you're trying to achieve. Now, the transmission control protocol is incredibly important. This is where we get into stuff like packet switching with you know, headers and error checking and all that kind of stuff. The basic functionality that allows Internet traffic to work as it does. So instead of sending, say an enormous file all in one big chunk, you divide it up into packets, which makes it far easier to deliver to your destination even if a pathway shuts down. So, like let's say that you have a route planned where the information is going from computer one to computer five hundred, but then one of the computers along that route shuts off. Well, if you're sending one big file and it hasn't finished transferring yet, then you've got errors, you've got an incomplete file. You're gonna have to start all over again. If you divide that file into lots of teeny tiny little packets and you send all those packets across the network, and not all of them are taking the same path. They're all going to the same destination, but they're taking different ways to get there, then it's far more likely that all that information is going to arrive at its destination and get reassembled into whatever the original fileile was. That's the basics of how internet transfers work. But we're more interested in focusing on the other set of rules, the IP, the Internet protocol. These are the rules that involve attaching addresses to information so that the system can tell where the information is coming from and where it is going to. It's kind of like the physical postal address that you would put on a piece of mail so that the post service could accurately deliver your letter, or in the event that it's undeliverable could return the letter to you. You know, like, if it turns out the address your grandma gave you was fake and she's currently on the run from the authorities, I might be projecting a little here. Stay safe, Grandma. While the first part of tcp IP published way back in nineteen seventy four, the IP address stuff doesn't really come into play for another decade, mostly because it took years to establish a stable version of TCPIP that was reliable enough to reply the older NCP rules. These things aren't like an overnight switch. As it turns out, this included the creation of IP addresses, something that I'm sure you have heard about. The original set of rules for addresses came about with IPv four, and those involved a thirty two bit address. That means that the IPv four could represent nearly four point three billion different addresses, but I should add that lots of addresses were withheld for various reasons. Also, four point three billion wouldn't be enough addresses. It was clear that while it was more than sufficient for the arpinet days and the early Internet days, over time we would eventually run out of addresses to assign to devices, and we would need a different solution that ultimately would arrive with IPv six, but again, that's another topic for a different time. The IPv four address format consists of four numbers, and each number is separated from the others by a period. Each number could range between zero and two hundred and fifty five. Each set of numbers is an octet, which means it is made up of eight bits or a byte of information, so you get four bytes or thirty two bits total. Viola, I'm sorry, voila. Gotta just refer to that in my notes here. The address can also be thought of as two parts. One part represents the network prefix and the other part is the host number. So the network prefix would be the same for all devices connected to the Internet through that same network. The host numbers would be unique to the individual devices connected to that network. Also, if the device is only visible to the local network, it could have a locally unique number that potentially isn't globally unique. That means some other device somewhere else on the Internet could have that same address. Now, if the device is visible to the world at large, then it needs its own unique number or else than there's confusion because you would have more than one device with the same address, which would be kind of like if someone in your town somehow has the same address as you, but lives in a different part of town entirely. Like let's say there's for some reason, two different Oak Streets and they have similar numbering conventions for the houses, and you live in one twenty three Oak Street on one side of town, and someone else lives in one twenty three Oak Street on the other side of town, and you both would end up getting mail for each other on a pretty frequent basis. That would be the same issue. So you have to have unique addresses otherwise the whole function of the Internet starts to break down. Now, the IPv four approach was great and that it made it possible for machines to connect to other specific machines across a network of networks, which is what the Internet is. But while machines could do this fairly simply, it was a real bear for human beings because you know, remembering a sequence of four numbers for everything that you want to send mail to or you want to go visit a website on the World Wide Web, that would be a huge headache, right, Like, what was this one, two, seven, dot like it would just be a nightmare. So what was needed was a means to translate those numbers into some other format, a format that would be much easier for human beings to work with. And thus we enter the concept of domain names, which were created as part of the Domain Name System, which came into being around nineteen eighty three or so. The domain name system would allow users to rely on addresses made up of words and letters instead of seemingly random numbers. The machines are still communicating through numbers. The domain names and addresses are just a layer that's easier for humans to work with, kind of like programming languages, same sort of thing. It's a level of abstraction that's easier for us to handle than if we get down to the actual machine code. And so there was already precedents for this kind of approach using something that humans can work with. Machines can't natively work with that format, but you can have it interact or relate to machine code or in this case, IP addresses that would allow for machines to be able to actually make sense of the information. So those domain names and addresses, it's just a layer, and each of those corresponds to a numeric address. The domains themselves have multiple parts. Now, one of those parts is what we call the top level domain or TLD. This is what we're concerned with when it comes to VeriSign. The TLD is the extension that follows the dot at the end of a basic URL. So, for example, years ago, I wrote for the website HowStuffWorks dot Com. Well, that dot com part is the top level domain. The comm stands for commercial, and the dot com domain was meant for commercial organization. It's also far and away the most popular of the top level domains. The house stuff Works bit of the address would be what we would call a second level domain. The www bit at the beginning of the web URL would be a subdomain. But it's the top level domains we're really concerned about when we're talking about vera sign. So we'll talk more about what that means in just a moment, But first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. All right, So, in order to get a domain for a website, you have to purchase your domain from a registrar. Registrars are the companies responsible for selling and assigning a domain to a customer. So if you want a top level domain where your top level domain is, well, ultimately your registrar has to get that from a registry. These are two different services, they're similar, and in fact VeriSign itself historically has operated as both, though that changed many years ago. At this point, we'll get to that. So if you wanta dot com domain, ultimately, once you go up the chain, the supply chain for domain names, VeriSign is the stopping point for that. VeriSign is the only company that ultimately oversees the registration of dot com domains. So how did that happen? How is it that a single company became the gatekeeper for the dot com TLD. Well, we've got a lot more history to get through before we can actually answer that, because this is complicated stuff, and this history also gets a bit fuzzy because in real life it could be hard to point out a firm date and say definitively this is when it began. But let's try and muddle our way through this. So the DNS, the domain name system, becomes a thing around nineteen eighty three, a decade before most folks would even have heard of the Internet at that point, Because I would argue it was the World Wide Web that introduced a lot of people to the concept of the Internet, so much so that for a lot of folks the two are synonymous, although the World Wide Web is just one set of services that exists on top of the Internet. Before the DNS, engineers working on ARPINET had established a sort of catalog to keep track of network infrastructure, sockets, addresses, and other words. John Postel and Joyce K Reynolds were chiefly responsible for keeping track of IP addresses from the earliest days, which is pretty wild because this was just kind of a side quest to their main responsibilities. It wasn't their job to do this, they did it in addition to their jobs. Somewhat orally, a department that ultimately became known as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority or IANA would start to take form now according to various RFCs, which stands for Request for Comments. RFCs are in large part the documentation the historical documents that help us keep track of how the Internet gradually took shape, and they are hard to follow if you're not an engineer, and I'm not. They are a challenge to follow because they weren't necessarily written to be like a historical documentation, they were an ongoing discussion among the various people working on the systems to keep up with what's going on and to share developments. Anyway, the first appearance of ia in A in an RFC documentation was somewhere in the late nineteen eighties. But those very same documents that mention ia in a by name for the time say essentially that the department, or the functions at least were as old as arpinnet itself. The engineers just hadn't documented an official name for it for a couple of decades now. In addition to Postel's work, an engineer named Elizabeth Feinler developed a directory of numerical addresses reference through a list of host names and a document titled hosts dot txt. Feindler would manually add host names and their assigned numeric addresses to the directory, and it was Feinler's department that gradually developed the idea for domain names to make it easier for humans to work with the system instead of having to do this cross referencing, where you know, you look up a host name, like you know what host name you want to send information to, so you look it up in this directory so you can find the IP address you need to use in order to send the information there. Well, that's already complicated enough just on its own, but it was getting far more complicated as more machines were joining the network. You know, each time a new machine joins the network, it adds to the complexity of the overall system. That complexity would grow considerably throughout the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. Now, for a long time, those machines joining the networks were either from research institutions, universities and colleges, or government agencies, including the military, And in fact, the military and large part was funding a lot of the work going into this. Keep in mind, you know, ARPINET started as a defense project, right DARPA what is today called DARPA. Back in the day, it was called ARPA. So it all started as a defense thing, and for the longest time, the government oversaw stuff. But gradually that would start to shift as more, you know, non government folks were starting to get involved in the network. John Postel continued to oversee the process of assigning names and addresses up to the late nineteen nineties, which is pretty phenomenal because by then you're getting into the dot com days. But around ninety seven, the United States government stepped in. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration or NTIA we'll talk about them later, which itself is part of the US Department of Commerce, sought to create a new nonprofit organization that would oversee functions such as assigning DNS addresses and that kind of thing. In late nineteen ninety eight, it created the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICON i CAN if you prefer ICA n N. Now i CAN assumed the responsibility of overseeing the DNS functions of IANA IAANA. So lots of acronyms in this too. I'm apologizing for that, but you know I wasn't the one who came up with him. So John Postel was meant to be the chief technology officer for i CAN, but sadly he passed away following a surgical procedure and he died about a month after i CAN was first incorporated. Okay, but now we have to talk about another organization that was operating at the same time as all the stuff I just mentioned. This is where Elizabeth Feindler comes back into it, and this would be the Network Information Center the NIC or NICK, later known as INTERNICK. This organization grew out of the Stanford Research Institute, which is now known as SRI International. And I'm just going to refer to it as INTERNICK as a matter of convenience, but it actually didn't get that name until like the nineteen nineties. I'm just going to use that name rather than switching back and forth because we're already going to have so many different names and acronyms in this and initialisms. So internick was kind of like a reference library. It maintained a directory of address numbers and published them to the network at large, and it handled actual registration requests. So this was Elizabeth Feindler's group. Stanford oversaw Internet until night teen ninety one, and at that point the department changed hands. And this is bringing us ever closer to VERI sign. We're not there yet, but we're getting closer. So the company that would take over Internet in nineteen ninety one was called Network Solutions. Now, technically the US government gave the job of overseeing Internet to another company called Government Systems Incorporated, But then Government Systems turned around and subcontracted the work to Network Solutions. This is a great business to get in. By the way, if you can be a business that lands huge contracts and then you subcontract that work to someone else and you just keep the difference, man, what a racket. Not saying that government systems was a racket, but golly sure, I sure could get into that biz anyway. So Network Solutions got its start in nineteen seventy nine as a consulting company in the tech sector, and in nineteen ninety three it won a bid to become the exclusive register nation services provider for non military entities wishing to register a domain on the Internet. It won this bid by being using by following a very very sound strategy, being the only company that actually bid for the gig. Now, this meant that Network Solutions was the one and only place someone could go to if they wanted to register a TLD that was in the dot org, dot net and dot com categories. Network Solutions had a monopoly on that business. Now, I call it a business, but in truth, at the time it wasn't really a business because Network Solutions was not allowed to charge for domain name registrations. Yet it was still a free service ultimately provided by the government, so the government was essentially paying this company Government Systems, which in turn was paying Network Solutions to oversee this process. But they weren't turning people into customers. They were providing a service for free that was government funded. In nineteen ninety five, another company called Science Applications International Corporation or SAIC, or as I prefer to call them, PSYCH, they acquired Network Solutions for four point seven million dollars. Keep that number in mind, because holy cats, will that be a world of difference in just five years. Further into this history, not long after PSYCH took over control of Network Solutions, the National Science Foundation or NSF, gave PSYCH and therefore Network Solutions, the power to charge a fee for registering domain names. This is where things start to shift, where now it is a business. Before it was a service that was government funded. Now it's a business where Network Solutions can charge a fee in order to register a domain name to customers. Not at that point, Network Solutions began to charge applicants a one hundred dollars and for one hundred dollars you could register a domain name for a period of two years, and after two years you would need to renew your registration. Thirty percent of the fee that Network Solutions charged would end up going to the National Science Foundation in SF to help fund other services. But this rubbed people the wrong way because it was a single service provider. Here there was no competition. You couldn't go anywhere else to register a top level domain URL or address. So in nineteen ninety seven a lawsuit argued that Network Solutions was in fact a monopoly and because thirty percent of the fees being paid to Network Solutions were going to a government agency, that amounted to illegal taxation. So Network Solutions ended up ending its payments out to the NSF. It could still charge for registration, but that thirty percent would go to NSF. Thankfully, that also meant that at least initially, the cost for registering a domain dropped by thirty percent, so it became seventy dollars for two years before you needed to renew. So in nineteen ninety eight, i CAN was given the authority to oversee the dns, and i CAN chose Surprise Surprise Network Solutions to continue to have this exclusive holdover dot net, dot Oregon, dot Com TLDs. So for Network Solutions, nothing really changed other than i CAN became the new authority overseeing this rather than specifically the NSF. Not that the NSF would be uninvolved, but you get the point, all right. So this holds true for a couple of years. We skip ahead to two thousand. It's the heady days of the dot com boom, before the bubble had actually burst, and numerous companies would find themselves struggling to stay in business. But that's when Network Solutions got a new owner, and this is where or VeriSign finally comes into play. So VeriSign got its start back in nineteen ninety five, so it was a relatively young company. It was only five years old when it made this move, and it had started off as a provider of certification services, and by that I mean Internet certification services. So you know that when you sign on to a website and you see that little padlock symbol up in your urlbar, that padlock symbol indicates that the site you're visiting is protecting the data traffic between you and that website through encryption, meaning that if anyone else snooped in on your data transfers to that website, all they would get was encrypted data, which wouldn't mean anything to them, at least assuming the encryption is really good. The padlock shows that the protection is certified, meaning some other authority has analyzed and certified that the process is secure. VeriSign one of the companies that provided that kind of certification, thus ensuring that digital commerce could occur safely over the internet. Keep in mind, back in nineteen ninety five, commerce online was a new and scary idea. People were understandably reticent to just plug their credit card numbers into a computer. You never knew who might get hold of that information. So companies like VeriSign would end up playing a really important part in establishing a safe and secure infrastructure to allow online commerce to actually become a thing. And business must have been pretty darn good, because in two thousand, VeriSign made a huge move and acquired Network Solutions from Psych for the princely sum of twenty one billion with a B dollars. Now, remember Psych Saic had purchased Network Solutions for less than five million with an M dollars back in nineteen ninety five, then sold it five years later for twenty one billion dollars. That, my friends, is a heck of a return on investment. But it's not as clear as all that it's not as amazing a turnaround as that. I mean, it is an amazing turnaround, But to be honest, SAIC had actually been selling off portions of its ownership, like it had been selling off percentages of its stake in Network Solutions to other parties since it had acquired the company in nineteen ninety five. So while SAIC saw an enormous payout due to this acquisition, it wasn't as impressive as it would have been if, in fact, it held full ownership of Network Solutions at that point. But you get the idea, you know, four point seven million to twenty one billion in five years phenomenal. It also says a lot that the original version of Network Solutions was essentially a government funded and thus government restricted business, So it was also a very different world in ninety five than it was in two thousand. All Right, we're going to take another quick break. When we come back, we'll talk more about VeriSign and the current concerns surrounding the company. All right, we're back. So before the break, we talked about how VeriSign comes in and buys Network Solutions, and by the transitive property of ownership, VeriSign becomes the new exclusive keeper of the dot com, dot net and dot org TLD's top level domains. That's when the Security is in Exchange Commission where SEC took an interest in VeriSign. So for a while, Network Solutions had been operating two distinct but related businesses. Business number one was to serve as a registry. Now essentially, a registry serves as a database, and it could sell top level main addresses wholesale to registrars. Registrars could then sell domain names or domain name registrations to customers. However, Network Solutions was also acting as a registrar itself, so it's both a registry and a registrar. The SEC felt this was way too much power concentrated into a single organization, and it could use its monopolistic holdover the dot com, dot net and dot org TLDs to create predatory pricing. So VeriSign sold off its registrar business and held onto the registry part. Now, VeriSign could sell top level domains wholesale to registrars, and the registrars in turn could sell those two customers. So effectively, this meant VeriSign sold off part of Network Solutions to another company called Pivotal Equity Groups. So we'll say by by to Network Solutions from this point forward. Just know that the services that Networkstions provided, at least regarding being a registry, are now verisigns. So VeriSign would remain the sole organization ultimately in charge of those dot com TLDs. And that's where the current situation comes back into play. So at the heart of the issue is a change in the rules that VeriSign has to follow when it comes to how much it can charge customers for registering TLDs. Keep in mind this is because the government, the US government, has been heavily involved in this from the beginning. Initially, the predecessor to averisign was not allowed to charge for registering top level domain names. You couldn't do it. It was all government provided. But the slow transition from the Internet being a government owned and operated entity to a global market entity unto itself meant that things had to change. So there were still rules in place to keep VeriSign or its predecessor from charging out the wazoo. Because being a single company in charge of this this particular commodity, the dot com TLDs, there needed to be some restrictions otherwise, because the dot com domain names are so valuable, you would end up getting charged ridiculous amounts of money in order to register your domain name. You might still get that, but that's because the registrar, not the registry. So at the heart of the current matter is a change in the rules that VeriSign has to follow when it comes to how much it charges its customers for registering TLDs. Now, according to a letter from Senator Warren and Representative Nadler, quote, VeriSign is exploiting its monopoly power to charge millions of users excessive prices for registering a dot Com top level domain. VeriSign hasn't changed or in improved its services. It has simply raised prices because it holds a government insured monopoly end quote now. Essentially, during the previous Trump administration, the government eased off a little bit on the restrictions it had placed over how much VeriSign was allowed to charge customers. So the company, once these restrictions were gone, increased its prices. Now, according to the letter from the politicians I mentioned earlier, that increase was around thirty percent, So the prices went up by thirty percent but the services provided hadn't changed in any material way, So you're paying thirty percent more for the exact same service you had earlier. Nothing else has improved or been fleshed out further. Again, this is according to their letter, So essentially, Warren and Nadler are saying, you're charging more for the same services, and because you have a monopoly, there's nowhere else for customers to go, so this amounts to price gouging. Now, as you might imagine, various design objects to the way that this has been framed. The company claims that a quote small, self interested group of domain name investors end quote are behind all this. That you know, this isn't a real public issue. It's something that some people who have a vested interest in the matter are pursuing because they have the potential to make a lot of money if things change. But things shouldn't change because they're not inherently unfair, according to VeriSign, and also says that the complaints the politicians are raising echo some so called inaccuracies around the TLD registry business. Also, VeriSign says there are alternatives to dot com in the TLD space, so that means that VeriSign's not operating a monopoly, and I guess that's an argument. I mean, you could say VeriSign does have a monopolistic holdover dot com domains. That's indisputable. They do. They're the soul registry for dot com. But it's also true that there are other registries out there for other kinds of TLDs. So, for example, if you wanted to register a domain that had a dot tv as its top level domain, well then you would have to go through go Daddy registry. By the way, technically dot tv is an Internet country Code top level domain and it's for TAVALU, but a lot of sites use dot TV because TV can also mean television. Thus you have things like dropout TV. Complicating matters is the fact that I can ultimately has the authority to reject price hikes in the Domain Name Registry Services space, and this comes from the NTIA. So hang on, if I can is able to reject price hikes, then where's the problem? Because yes, you do have VeriSign as an entity that has exclusive rights to the dot Com registry business. However, if a nonprofit organization that's closely associated with the US government ultimately has authority to reject price increases. Doesn't that solve things? Well, not so fast, because back in twenty twenty, VeriSign and i CAN signed an agreement in which VeriSign was allowed to increase prices to a certain maximum and in return, i CAN would receive twenty million dollars over the course of five years. Now, Warren and Nadler are saying this appears to be a case of collusion, where these two organizations have colluded and created a mutually beneficial relationship that is ultimately predating upon customers. So the customers are unfairly burdened with price increases and they have no recourse, they have no competing service they can go to to get a dot com top level domain, and they're not getting an improvement in their services now. As wireds Joel khalely reported back in late November, I think it was November twenty second, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration or NTIA was set to renew this agreement with VeriSign after a review on November thirty, and that meant with this review that there would actually be a chance that new pricing rules could come into play and that VeriSign would be forced to lower prices, and that these rules would actually be in effect for six years, which means they'd actually remain in place for the entirety of the second Trump administration, because that lasts four years. But nothing really turned out that way, and why was that? Well, the NTIA renewed the agreement with VeriSign and did nothing to address the price issues, and in a release, the NTIA said it really wished it could have done something. Cush gosh, darn it, what a sticky wicket, which is not a very satisfying conclusion to this story. As Andrew Allmann of Domain name Wire put it, the nt IA essentially said, golly, we really wish we could do something, but sadly, we just don't have the authority to set dot com domain prices. And here's the kicker, according to Aliman, quote, this statement is strange because it is the NTIA that literally sets a cap on dot com prices end quote. So yeah, the government organization is saying we don't have the authority to do the thing we're authorized to do. Now, Aliman actually extends some understanding toward the NTIA. It's just that perhaps the issue is really that because of the twenty twenty agreement between VeriSign and I can the NTIA is not able to set a cap on prices without actual cooperation from VeriSign itself, and obviously VeriSign has a vested interest in not creating lower price caps for its services. Like a business is not gonna sit there and say, oh, yeah, yeah, you're right, I should charge less for this thing that you can own only get from me, and I have all the leverage here, so obviously I should lower my prices. So vera Sign said, you know what, we're going to decline that at least that's that's the assumption that that's why the NTIA was unable to put in new price caps on the TLD registration business or registry business. The NTIA did lament that the whole pricing situation is pretty darn messed up from the wholesale side of the registry business all the way downstream to the customer, and that ultimately customers are kind of at the mercy of the various companies within the industry. You know, gosh darn it, if only the government had the authority to actually address potentially unfair business practices. Anyway, that's where we stand now with one company ultimately sitting on a vault of dot com TLDs and considering it was Trump's first administration that gave VeriSign more freedom to increase prices in the first place, I imagine we're not going to see any efforts to curb costs in the near future. So this is kind of where we're at. And I thought it was interesting that there was this move against verisigns so late in the game, especially since ultimately you can trace the whole history of this back to how the government handled the Internet in the early days, Like this wasn't a private company or even a publicly traded company that created the situation. This was a situation created by the US government that now the US government is like, h this isn't ideal. Some might have seen this as a way for Democrat leaders to try and stick it to the Trump administration by getting some policy changes in at the last minute, changes that would last six years, so that it would kind of be a thorn in the side, or at least a little thumb of the nose at Republican leaders because they're going to be in charge for the next several years. But it didn't work. Like that didn't that's not how it turned out. So if that was an attempt, it failed, and it just means that I think it's going to be business as usual for the near future. Heck, it might end up meaning that ultimately we have to pay even more for the whole registration process, because if varsign can increase prices again I'm sure it will, that will pass costs down to the registrars, who will then pass those costs down to customers because everyone needs to make some scratch off of those transactions. And ultimately it means that the consumer at the end of the line ends up bearing the expense. So fun times. But that's it. That's a quick explanation and a very very high level explanation of what's going on on the business side of domain names. As I said, it is far more complicated than what I've talked about here, both on a technical level and from a corporate level or an administration level, And if you are interested, there are numerous resources out there that go into far more detail about how the domain name system took shape over years of tweaking and experimentation, how the administration of the dns changed over time, and the competing ideas that ultimately didn't make it, whereas the DNS did. All of that is documented in different places online. It is fascinating, but it's a huge amount of information and far too much for me to tackle on an episode of tech Stuff. But I hope you found this interesting. I hope you're all doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. 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Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. Recently here in the United States, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressman Jerry Nadler have called for an investigation into a company called VeriSign. So why did they do that? Well, they say that VeriSign has engaged in predatory pricing their words. And what is VeriSign's business, Well, among other things, vera sign is the one and only entity acting as a registry for some top level domain names, and we're going to break all that down so that it's easier to parse. But let me preface this by saying this is complicated stuff, not just technically, but from like an organizational perspective. This is really complex and there's gonna be a lot of talk about the responsibilities of a registry in this episode and how things have kind of shifted around since the days of arpenet into the Internet. So what I'm saying is that there's a lot more to this than what I'm going to cover. In fact, I'm not even going to get into things like the DNS wars or the Root Registry wars, or any of that stuff, because it would require a full series of episodes all by themselves. So if what I'm talking about today is interesting to you and you want to learn more, let me tell you there is a wealth of information online. You can just do some searching around for things like DNS wars, for example, and learn all about how people were trying to establish standards in price. This is, you know, before you actually arrive at standards and practices, it can be a little bit like the wild West out there, and that was certainly the case with early organization of information on the Internet infrastructure. But let's talk about devices and names now. The naming of computers is a difficult matter. It isn't just one of your holiday games. You may think at first, I'm as mad as a hatter when I tell you a computer as a name that's really a bunch of numbers. You know. I was really going to try and channel ts Elliott through the whole episode, but it kind of fell off quickly there, So I guess there goes my chance of having this episode be turned into a musical by Androloid Weber. But yeah, in the early days of arpinnet, when a bunch of computer scientists were kind of sussing out how to create a system in which different computers would be able to communicate with one another and send and receive files and all that kind of stuff. One of the many challenges required that each computer have a unique name or address assigned to it. Otherwise you would have to rely on maybe a direct computer to computer connection to send information from computer A to computer B. And that works if you're just talking about two computers. Right, If you just need to directly connect two machines together, no big deal. I mean, it is a big deal. But you could do that. You could create a physical connection and create standards that would allow one computer to talk to another. Keep in mind, different computers communicate in very different ways, so you'd have to kind of build a translator in on either side so that the computers could understand the information being sent back and forth. But more than that, if you add more computers to this, so that you don't just have computer A and B, but you have C through Z and then all the numbers, well you get into a system that's far more complicated. Right. You can't just directly connect Computer A to all five thousand other machines that are on the network. That would be impossible. You would just have a massive cables that would be a real tripping hazard if nothing else, Plus where would you plug them all into. So sooner or later, you're going to have a huge mess on your hands that needs to be solved through some other means. And thus it makes more sense to create an infrastructure in which each computer has a unique name or address. So if Computer one wants to talk to Computer five hundred, will both computers have their own unique addresses, and that facilitates this connection between the two, so that Computer one is communicating only with Computer five hundred and not just blasting out information to four hundred ninety nine machines only one of which actually is relevant. You don't want it to be a party line. So those unique addresses would allow this to happen. And computers two through four hundred ninety nine plus anything above five hundred one or five oh one. And further, none of those are going to accidentally get the information meant to just go between these other two computers one in five hundred. So I'm not going to dwell too much on the old NCP days. NCP stands for Network Control Protocol. That is a topic that will require a deeper dive in itself in order to talk about network infrastructure. But it's a predecessor to what we have today. So instead, let's turn our attention to an approach that would succeed the old NCP rules, and that would be TCP IP. We usually write that as TCP slash IP. These are two sets of rules that are the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet protocol. Remember, protocol is really just a fancy word to say rule set. This is the process, the rules that you follow in order to achieve whatever the thing is you're trying to achieve. Now, the transmission control protocol is incredibly important. This is where we get into stuff like packet switching with you know, headers and error checking and all that kind of stuff. The basic functionality that allows Internet traffic to work as it does. So instead of sending, say an enormous file all in one big chunk, you divide it up into packets, which makes it far easier to deliver to your destination even if a pathway shuts down. So, like let's say that you have a route planned where the information is going from computer one to computer five hundred, but then one of the computers along that route shuts off. Well, if you're sending one big file and it hasn't finished transferring yet, then you've got errors, you've got an incomplete file. You're gonna have to start all over again. If you divide that file into lots of teeny tiny little packets and you send all those packets across the network, and not all of them are taking the same path. They're all going to the same destination, but they're taking different ways to get there, then it's far more likely that all that information is going to arrive at its destination and get reassembled into whatever the original fileile was. That's the basics of how internet transfers work. But we're more interested in focusing on the other set of rules, the IP, the Internet protocol. These are the rules that involve attaching addresses to information so that the system can tell where the information is coming from and where it is going to. It's kind of like the physical postal address that you would put on a piece of mail so that the post service could accurately deliver your letter, or in the event that it's undeliverable could return the letter to you. You know, like, if it turns out the address your grandma gave you was fake and she's currently on the run from the authorities, I might be projecting a little here. Stay safe, Grandma. While the first part of tcp IP published way back in nineteen seventy four, the IP address stuff doesn't really come into play for another decade, mostly because it took years to establish a stable version of TCPIP that was reliable enough to reply the older NCP rules. These things aren't like an overnight switch. As it turns out, this included the creation of IP addresses, something that I'm sure you have heard about. The original set of rules for addresses came about with IPv four, and those involved a thirty two bit address. That means that the IPv four could represent nearly four point three billion different addresses, but I should add that lots of addresses were withheld for various reasons. Also, four point three billion wouldn't be enough addresses. It was clear that while it was more than sufficient for the arpinet days and the early Internet days, over time we would eventually run out of addresses to assign to devices, and we would need a different solution that ultimately would arrive with IPv six, but again, that's another topic for a different time. The IPv four address format consists of four numbers, and each number is separated from the others by a period. Each number could range between zero and two hundred and fifty five. Each set of numbers is an octet, which means it is made up of eight bits or a byte of information, so you get four bytes or thirty two bits total. Viola, I'm sorry, voila. Gotta just refer to that in my notes here. The address can also be thought of as two parts. One part represents the network prefix and the other part is the host number. So the network prefix would be the same for all devices connected to the Internet through that same network. The host numbers would be unique to the individual devices connected to that network. Also, if the device is only visible to the local network, it could have a locally unique number that potentially isn't globally unique. That means some other device somewhere else on the Internet could have that same address. Now, if the device is visible to the world at large, then it needs its own unique number or else than there's confusion because you would have more than one device with the same address, which would be kind of like if someone in your town somehow has the same address as you, but lives in a different part of town entirely. Like let's say there's for some reason, two different Oak Streets and they have similar numbering conventions for the houses, and you live in one twenty three Oak Street on one side of town, and someone else lives in one twenty three Oak Street on the other side of town, and you both would end up getting mail for each other on a pretty frequent basis. That would be the same issue. So you have to have unique addresses otherwise the whole function of the Internet starts to break down. Now, the IPv four approach was great and that it made it possible for machines to connect to other specific machines across a network of networks, which is what the Internet is. But while machines could do this fairly simply, it was a real bear for human beings because you know, remembering a sequence of four numbers for everything that you want to send mail to or you want to go visit a website on the World Wide Web, that would be a huge headache, right, Like, what was this one, two, seven, dot like it would just be a nightmare. So what was needed was a means to translate those numbers into some other format, a format that would be much easier for human beings to work with. And thus we enter the concept of domain names, which were created as part of the Domain Name System, which came into being around nineteen eighty three or so. The domain name system would allow users to rely on addresses made up of words and letters instead of seemingly random numbers. The machines are still communicating through numbers. The domain names and addresses are just a layer that's easier for humans to work with, kind of like programming languages, same sort of thing. It's a level of abstraction that's easier for us to handle than if we get down to the actual machine code. And so there was already precedents for this kind of approach using something that humans can work with. Machines can't natively work with that format, but you can have it interact or relate to machine code or in this case, IP addresses that would allow for machines to be able to actually make sense of the information. So those domain names and addresses, it's just a layer, and each of those corresponds to a numeric address. The domains themselves have multiple parts. Now, one of those parts is what we call the top level domain or TLD. This is what we're concerned with when it comes to VeriSign. The TLD is the extension that follows the dot at the end of a basic URL. So, for example, years ago, I wrote for the website HowStuffWorks dot Com. Well, that dot com part is the top level domain. The comm stands for commercial, and the dot com domain was meant for commercial organization. It's also far and away the most popular of the top level domains. The house stuff Works bit of the address would be what we would call a second level domain. The www bit at the beginning of the web URL would be a subdomain. But it's the top level domains we're really concerned about when we're talking about vera sign. So we'll talk more about what that means in just a moment, But first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. All right, So, in order to get a domain for a website, you have to purchase your domain from a registrar. Registrars are the companies responsible for selling and assigning a domain to a customer. So if you want a top level domain where your top level domain is, well, ultimately your registrar has to get that from a registry. These are two different services, they're similar, and in fact VeriSign itself historically has operated as both, though that changed many years ago. At this point, we'll get to that. So if you wanta dot com domain, ultimately, once you go up the chain, the supply chain for domain names, VeriSign is the stopping point for that. VeriSign is the only company that ultimately oversees the registration of dot com domains. So how did that happen? How is it that a single company became the gatekeeper for the dot com TLD. Well, we've got a lot more history to get through before we can actually answer that, because this is complicated stuff, and this history also gets a bit fuzzy because in real life it could be hard to point out a firm date and say definitively this is when it began. But let's try and muddle our way through this. So the DNS, the domain name system, becomes a thing around nineteen eighty three, a decade before most folks would even have heard of the Internet at that point, Because I would argue it was the World Wide Web that introduced a lot of people to the concept of the Internet, so much so that for a lot of folks the two are synonymous, although the World Wide Web is just one set of services that exists on top of the Internet. Before the DNS, engineers working on ARPINET had established a sort of catalog to keep track of network infrastructure, sockets, addresses, and other words. John Postel and Joyce K Reynolds were chiefly responsible for keeping track of IP addresses from the earliest days, which is pretty wild because this was just kind of a side quest to their main responsibilities. It wasn't their job to do this, they did it in addition to their jobs. Somewhat orally, a department that ultimately became known as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority or IANA would start to take form now according to various RFCs, which stands for Request for Comments. RFCs are in large part the documentation the historical documents that help us keep track of how the Internet gradually took shape, and they are hard to follow if you're not an engineer, and I'm not. They are a challenge to follow because they weren't necessarily written to be like a historical documentation, they were an ongoing discussion among the various people working on the systems to keep up with what's going on and to share developments. Anyway, the first appearance of ia in A in an RFC documentation was somewhere in the late nineteen eighties. But those very same documents that mention ia in a by name for the time say essentially that the department, or the functions at least were as old as arpinnet itself. The engineers just hadn't documented an official name for it for a couple of decades now. In addition to Postel's work, an engineer named Elizabeth Feinler developed a directory of numerical addresses reference through a list of host names and a document titled hosts dot txt. Feindler would manually add host names and their assigned numeric addresses to the directory, and it was Feinler's department that gradually developed the idea for domain names to make it easier for humans to work with the system instead of having to do this cross referencing, where you know, you look up a host name, like you know what host name you want to send information to, so you look it up in this directory so you can find the IP address you need to use in order to send the information there. Well, that's already complicated enough just on its own, but it was getting far more complicated as more machines were joining the network. You know, each time a new machine joins the network, it adds to the complexity of the overall system. That complexity would grow considerably throughout the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties. Now, for a long time, those machines joining the networks were either from research institutions, universities and colleges, or government agencies, including the military, And in fact, the military and large part was funding a lot of the work going into this. Keep in mind, you know, ARPINET started as a defense project, right DARPA what is today called DARPA. Back in the day, it was called ARPA. So it all started as a defense thing, and for the longest time, the government oversaw stuff. But gradually that would start to shift as more, you know, non government folks were starting to get involved in the network. John Postel continued to oversee the process of assigning names and addresses up to the late nineteen nineties, which is pretty phenomenal because by then you're getting into the dot com days. But around ninety seven, the United States government stepped in. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration or NTIA we'll talk about them later, which itself is part of the US Department of Commerce, sought to create a new nonprofit organization that would oversee functions such as assigning DNS addresses and that kind of thing. In late nineteen ninety eight, it created the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICON i CAN if you prefer ICA n N. Now i CAN assumed the responsibility of overseeing the DNS functions of IANA IAANA. So lots of acronyms in this too. I'm apologizing for that, but you know I wasn't the one who came up with him. So John Postel was meant to be the chief technology officer for i CAN, but sadly he passed away following a surgical procedure and he died about a month after i CAN was first incorporated. Okay, but now we have to talk about another organization that was operating at the same time as all the stuff I just mentioned. This is where Elizabeth Feindler comes back into it, and this would be the Network Information Center the NIC or NICK, later known as INTERNICK. This organization grew out of the Stanford Research Institute, which is now known as SRI International. And I'm just going to refer to it as INTERNICK as a matter of convenience, but it actually didn't get that name until like the nineteen nineties. I'm just going to use that name rather than switching back and forth because we're already going to have so many different names and acronyms in this and initialisms. So internick was kind of like a reference library. It maintained a directory of address numbers and published them to the network at large, and it handled actual registration requests. So this was Elizabeth Feindler's group. Stanford oversaw Internet until night teen ninety one, and at that point the department changed hands. And this is bringing us ever closer to VERI sign. We're not there yet, but we're getting closer. So the company that would take over Internet in nineteen ninety one was called Network Solutions. Now, technically the US government gave the job of overseeing Internet to another company called Government Systems Incorporated, But then Government Systems turned around and subcontracted the work to Network Solutions. This is a great business to get in. By the way, if you can be a business that lands huge contracts and then you subcontract that work to someone else and you just keep the difference, man, what a racket. Not saying that government systems was a racket, but golly sure, I sure could get into that biz anyway. So Network Solutions got its start in nineteen seventy nine as a consulting company in the tech sector, and in nineteen ninety three it won a bid to become the exclusive register nation services provider for non military entities wishing to register a domain on the Internet. It won this bid by being using by following a very very sound strategy, being the only company that actually bid for the gig. Now, this meant that Network Solutions was the one and only place someone could go to if they wanted to register a TLD that was in the dot org, dot net and dot com categories. Network Solutions had a monopoly on that business. Now, I call it a business, but in truth, at the time it wasn't really a business because Network Solutions was not allowed to charge for domain name registrations. Yet it was still a free service ultimately provided by the government, so the government was essentially paying this company Government Systems, which in turn was paying Network Solutions to oversee this process. But they weren't turning people into customers. They were providing a service for free that was government funded. In nineteen ninety five, another company called Science Applications International Corporation or SAIC, or as I prefer to call them, PSYCH, they acquired Network Solutions for four point seven million dollars. Keep that number in mind, because holy cats, will that be a world of difference in just five years. Further into this history, not long after PSYCH took over control of Network Solutions, the National Science Foundation or NSF, gave PSYCH and therefore Network Solutions, the power to charge a fee for registering domain names. This is where things start to shift, where now it is a business. Before it was a service that was government funded. Now it's a business where Network Solutions can charge a fee in order to register a domain name to customers. Not at that point, Network Solutions began to charge applicants a one hundred dollars and for one hundred dollars you could register a domain name for a period of two years, and after two years you would need to renew your registration. Thirty percent of the fee that Network Solutions charged would end up going to the National Science Foundation in SF to help fund other services. But this rubbed people the wrong way because it was a single service provider. Here there was no competition. You couldn't go anywhere else to register a top level domain URL or address. So in nineteen ninety seven a lawsuit argued that Network Solutions was in fact a monopoly and because thirty percent of the fees being paid to Network Solutions were going to a government agency, that amounted to illegal taxation. So Network Solutions ended up ending its payments out to the NSF. It could still charge for registration, but that thirty percent would go to NSF. Thankfully, that also meant that at least initially, the cost for registering a domain dropped by thirty percent, so it became seventy dollars for two years before you needed to renew. So in nineteen ninety eight, i CAN was given the authority to oversee the dns, and i CAN chose Surprise Surprise Network Solutions to continue to have this exclusive holdover dot net, dot Oregon, dot Com TLDs. So for Network Solutions, nothing really changed other than i CAN became the new authority overseeing this rather than specifically the NSF. Not that the NSF would be uninvolved, but you get the point, all right. So this holds true for a couple of years. We skip ahead to two thousand. It's the heady days of the dot com boom, before the bubble had actually burst, and numerous companies would find themselves struggling to stay in business. But that's when Network Solutions got a new owner, and this is where or VeriSign finally comes into play. So VeriSign got its start back in nineteen ninety five, so it was a relatively young company. It was only five years old when it made this move, and it had started off as a provider of certification services, and by that I mean Internet certification services. So you know that when you sign on to a website and you see that little padlock symbol up in your urlbar, that padlock symbol indicates that the site you're visiting is protecting the data traffic between you and that website through encryption, meaning that if anyone else snooped in on your data transfers to that website, all they would get was encrypted data, which wouldn't mean anything to them, at least assuming the encryption is really good. The padlock shows that the protection is certified, meaning some other authority has analyzed and certified that the process is secure. VeriSign one of the companies that provided that kind of certification, thus ensuring that digital commerce could occur safely over the internet. Keep in mind, back in nineteen ninety five, commerce online was a new and scary idea. People were understandably reticent to just plug their credit card numbers into a computer. You never knew who might get hold of that information. So companies like VeriSign would end up playing a really important part in establishing a safe and secure infrastructure to allow online commerce to actually become a thing. And business must have been pretty darn good, because in two thousand, VeriSign made a huge move and acquired Network Solutions from Psych for the princely sum of twenty one billion with a B dollars. Now, remember Psych Saic had purchased Network Solutions for less than five million with an M dollars back in nineteen ninety five, then sold it five years later for twenty one billion dollars. That, my friends, is a heck of a return on investment. But it's not as clear as all that it's not as amazing a turnaround as that. I mean, it is an amazing turnaround, But to be honest, SAIC had actually been selling off portions of its ownership, like it had been selling off percentages of its stake in Network Solutions to other parties since it had acquired the company in nineteen ninety five. So while SAIC saw an enormous payout due to this acquisition, it wasn't as impressive as it would have been if, in fact, it held full ownership of Network Solutions at that point. But you get the idea, you know, four point seven million to twenty one billion in five years phenomenal. It also says a lot that the original version of Network Solutions was essentially a government funded and thus government restricted business, So it was also a very different world in ninety five than it was in two thousand. All Right, we're going to take another quick break. When we come back, we'll talk more about VeriSign and the current concerns surrounding the company. All right, we're back. So before the break, we talked about how VeriSign comes in and buys Network Solutions, and by the transitive property of ownership, VeriSign becomes the new exclusive keeper of the dot com, dot net and dot org TLD's top level domains. That's when the Security is in Exchange Commission where SEC took an interest in VeriSign. So for a while, Network Solutions had been operating two distinct but related businesses. Business number one was to serve as a registry. Now essentially, a registry serves as a database, and it could sell top level main addresses wholesale to registrars. Registrars could then sell domain names or domain name registrations to customers. However, Network Solutions was also acting as a registrar itself, so it's both a registry and a registrar. The SEC felt this was way too much power concentrated into a single organization, and it could use its monopolistic holdover the dot com, dot net and dot org TLDs to create predatory pricing. So VeriSign sold off its registrar business and held onto the registry part. Now, VeriSign could sell top level domains wholesale to registrars, and the registrars in turn could sell those two customers. So effectively, this meant VeriSign sold off part of Network Solutions to another company called Pivotal Equity Groups. So we'll say by by to Network Solutions from this point forward. Just know that the services that Networkstions provided, at least regarding being a registry, are now verisigns. So VeriSign would remain the sole organization ultimately in charge of those dot com TLDs. And that's where the current situation comes back into play. So at the heart of the issue is a change in the rules that VeriSign has to follow when it comes to how much it can charge customers for registering TLDs. Keep in mind this is because the government, the US government, has been heavily involved in this from the beginning. Initially, the predecessor to averisign was not allowed to charge for registering top level domain names. You couldn't do it. It was all government provided. But the slow transition from the Internet being a government owned and operated entity to a global market entity unto itself meant that things had to change. So there were still rules in place to keep VeriSign or its predecessor from charging out the wazoo. Because being a single company in charge of this this particular commodity, the dot com TLDs, there needed to be some restrictions otherwise, because the dot com domain names are so valuable, you would end up getting charged ridiculous amounts of money in order to register your domain name. You might still get that, but that's because the registrar, not the registry. So at the heart of the current matter is a change in the rules that VeriSign has to follow when it comes to how much it charges its customers for registering TLDs. Now, according to a letter from Senator Warren and Representative Nadler, quote, VeriSign is exploiting its monopoly power to charge millions of users excessive prices for registering a dot Com top level domain. VeriSign hasn't changed or in improved its services. It has simply raised prices because it holds a government insured monopoly end quote now. Essentially, during the previous Trump administration, the government eased off a little bit on the restrictions it had placed over how much VeriSign was allowed to charge customers. So the company, once these restrictions were gone, increased its prices. Now, according to the letter from the politicians I mentioned earlier, that increase was around thirty percent, So the prices went up by thirty percent but the services provided hadn't changed in any material way, So you're paying thirty percent more for the exact same service you had earlier. Nothing else has improved or been fleshed out further. Again, this is according to their letter, So essentially, Warren and Nadler are saying, you're charging more for the same services, and because you have a monopoly, there's nowhere else for customers to go, so this amounts to price gouging. Now, as you might imagine, various design objects to the way that this has been framed. The company claims that a quote small, self interested group of domain name investors end quote are behind all this. That you know, this isn't a real public issue. It's something that some people who have a vested interest in the matter are pursuing because they have the potential to make a lot of money if things change. But things shouldn't change because they're not inherently unfair, according to VeriSign, and also says that the complaints the politicians are raising echo some so called inaccuracies around the TLD registry business. Also, VeriSign says there are alternatives to dot com in the TLD space, so that means that VeriSign's not operating a monopoly, and I guess that's an argument. I mean, you could say VeriSign does have a monopolistic holdover dot com domains. That's indisputable. They do. They're the soul registry for dot com. But it's also true that there are other registries out there for other kinds of TLDs. So, for example, if you wanted to register a domain that had a dot tv as its top level domain, well then you would have to go through go Daddy registry. By the way, technically dot tv is an Internet country Code top level domain and it's for TAVALU, but a lot of sites use dot TV because TV can also mean television. Thus you have things like dropout TV. Complicating matters is the fact that I can ultimately has the authority to reject price hikes in the Domain Name Registry Services space, and this comes from the NTIA. So hang on, if I can is able to reject price hikes, then where's the problem? Because yes, you do have VeriSign as an entity that has exclusive rights to the dot Com registry business. However, if a nonprofit organization that's closely associated with the US government ultimately has authority to reject price increases. Doesn't that solve things? Well, not so fast, because back in twenty twenty, VeriSign and i CAN signed an agreement in which VeriSign was allowed to increase prices to a certain maximum and in return, i CAN would receive twenty million dollars over the course of five years. Now, Warren and Nadler are saying this appears to be a case of collusion, where these two organizations have colluded and created a mutually beneficial relationship that is ultimately predating upon customers. So the customers are unfairly burdened with price increases and they have no recourse, they have no competing service they can go to to get a dot com top level domain, and they're not getting an improvement in their services now. As wireds Joel khalely reported back in late November, I think it was November twenty second, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration or NTIA was set to renew this agreement with VeriSign after a review on November thirty, and that meant with this review that there would actually be a chance that new pricing rules could come into play and that VeriSign would be forced to lower prices, and that these rules would actually be in effect for six years, which means they'd actually remain in place for the entirety of the second Trump administration, because that lasts four years. But nothing really turned out that way, and why was that? Well, the NTIA renewed the agreement with VeriSign and did nothing to address the price issues, and in a release, the NTIA said it really wished it could have done something. Cush gosh, darn it, what a sticky wicket, which is not a very satisfying conclusion to this story. As Andrew Allmann of Domain name Wire put it, the nt IA essentially said, golly, we really wish we could do something, but sadly, we just don't have the authority to set dot com domain prices. And here's the kicker, according to Aliman, quote, this statement is strange because it is the NTIA that literally sets a cap on dot com prices end quote. So yeah, the government organization is saying we don't have the authority to do the thing we're authorized to do. Now, Aliman actually extends some understanding toward the NTIA. It's just that perhaps the issue is really that because of the twenty twenty agreement between VeriSign and I can the NTIA is not able to set a cap on prices without actual cooperation from VeriSign itself, and obviously VeriSign has a vested interest in not creating lower price caps for its services. Like a business is not gonna sit there and say, oh, yeah, yeah, you're right, I should charge less for this thing that you can own only get from me, and I have all the leverage here, so obviously I should lower my prices. So vera Sign said, you know what, we're going to decline that at least that's that's the assumption that that's why the NTIA was unable to put in new price caps on the TLD registration business or registry business. The NTIA did lament that the whole pricing situation is pretty darn messed up from the wholesale side of the registry business all the way downstream to the customer, and that ultimately customers are kind of at the mercy of the various companies within the industry. You know, gosh darn it, if only the government had the authority to actually address potentially unfair business practices. Anyway, that's where we stand now with one company ultimately sitting on a vault of dot com TLDs and considering it was Trump's first administration that gave VeriSign more freedom to increase prices in the first place, I imagine we're not going to see any efforts to curb costs in the near future. So this is kind of where we're at. And I thought it was interesting that there was this move against verisigns so late in the game, especially since ultimately you can trace the whole history of this back to how the government handled the Internet in the early days, Like this wasn't a private company or even a publicly traded company that created the situation. This was a situation created by the US government that now the US government is like, h this isn't ideal. Some might have seen this as a way for Democrat leaders to try and stick it to the Trump administration by getting some policy changes in at the last minute, changes that would last six years, so that it would kind of be a thorn in the side, or at least a little thumb of the nose at Republican leaders because they're going to be in charge for the next several years. But it didn't work. Like that didn't that's not how it turned out. So if that was an attempt, it failed, and it just means that I think it's going to be business as usual for the near future. Heck, it might end up meaning that ultimately we have to pay even more for the whole registration process, because if varsign can increase prices again I'm sure it will, that will pass costs down to the registrars, who will then pass those costs down to customers because everyone needs to make some scratch off of those transactions. And ultimately it means that the consumer at the end of the line ends up bearing the expense. So fun times. But that's it. That's a quick explanation and a very very high level explanation of what's going on on the business side of domain names. As I said, it is far more complicated than what I've talked about here, both on a technical level and from a corporate level or an administration level, And if you are interested, there are numerous resources out there that go into far more detail about how the domain name system took shape over years of tweaking and experimentation, how the administration of the dns changed over time, and the competing ideas that ultimately didn't make it, whereas the DNS did. All of that is documented in different places online. It is fascinating, but it's a huge amount of information and far too much for me to tackle on an episode of tech Stuff. But I hope you found this interesting. I hope you're all doing well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. 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