Why your website is about to get more expensive
By Leah Nulen, Politico The most popular websites are about to get more expensive because of a no-bid deal between the Trump administration and the company that holds a monopoly on managing a prime part of the internet. And the Biden team isn’t sure it can back out of the arrangement. Planned price spikes by Verisign in the coming years may add just a few dollars to the cost of registering or renewing an internet addressing ending in “.com.” But critics say that extra expense — totaling an estimated $85 million for the first year alone — will cascade through the online economy, ultimately hitting consumers. And they fault the U.S. government for not even trying to get a better deal by bidding out the contract that Verisign has held for more than two decades. “When it’s a government monopoly, you should have some mechanism to protect the consumer interests,” said Deb Garza, a former federal antitrust official who had been involved in contract discussions with Verisign during the George...