Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen
“You have probably never heard of the most profitable company in America, and possibly the world. It’s a government-granted monopoly that feasts on high margins for a low-dollar administrative product. Today, three advocacy groups pressured the Biden administration to take down the rules in place that enable this gravy train. The company is called VeriSign, and it has exclusive control of the registration system for the .com domain name. Every year, hundreds of millions of website owners pay VeriSign a small annual fee to keep their .com in working order. Every year, the cost of managing the database to make sure that .com websites work either stays flat or goes down, while the fee for registering a .com website goes up. As a result, VeriSign’s operating income before taxes in 2023, as a percentage of the nearly $1.5 billion in revenue, was an incredible 65.4 percent, according to its financial disclosures.” (06/27/24)
https://prospect.org/power/2024-06-27-government-created-most-profitable-company-verisign/