Remember January 20, 2025, about a thousand years ago, when Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term as President of the United States?
Remember how the dais at the Capitol rotunda was stacked with tech bros including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook, each of whom had authorized million-dollar donations to the Trump inauguration fund?
You will not have seen Verisign CEO Jim Bidzos among the crowd of VIP supporters, but it turns out that’s probably only because his company didn’t cough up enough cash.
The .com registry operator donated $100,000 to the Trump Vance Inauguration Committee, records published Sunday by the Federal Election Commission show.
I’ve searched the disclosure (pdf) for other deep-pocketed domain industry companies and CEOs but couldn’t find any.
The Verisign donation is only a tenth of the size of donations made by Meta, Google and Cook, and is a drop in the ocean compared to the overall size of the fund, which reports put at an eye-watering $245.3 million.
The aforementioned tech bros were accused at the time of making the donations in order to curry favor with the new administration. Some, such as Meta, have since changed their policies to pander to Trump’s sensibilities.
Verisign’s most critical engagement with the US government comes via its Cooperative Agreement with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, part of the Department of Commerce.
The Cooperative Agreement is the document that cements Verisign’s monopoly over .com and gives it its price-raising powers, currently set at 7% in four out of the six years of the contract’s duration.
The deal was renewed last year and is not due to be renewed under the current Trump administration (unless…). Prices had been frozen for six years under Obama, but Trump reinstated the 7% powers in 2018 during his first term.
But Verisign has also been engaged in talks with the NTIA about downstream pricing — at registrars and domain investors — that have a lot of people worried.
Renewing the agreement last November, the NTIA said that “prices at both the wholesale level and downstream, including prices charged by resellers and substantial markups by warehousers, need to be addressed”.
These talks appear to have stalled due to lack of leadership at NTIA, which is headed by a political appointee. Even 91 days after Trump was inaugurated, the agency does not yet have a confirmed chief.
Adam Cassady, formerly with the Federal Communications Commission, is currently acting assistant secretary, but Trump’s pick as his permanent replacement is Arielle Roth, policy director on the Senate’s commerce committee.
Roth came in for a grilling over suggestions she would use her powers over broadband policy to benefit Elon Musk’s Starlink, but seems to be a shoo-in for confirmation
In Verisign’s most recent earnings call, Bidzos noted that “unregulated retail price increases exceed our wholesale price increases”, adding “we look forward to engaging with our new regulators”.
So what does a hundred grand buy you nowadays? I guess we’ll find out soon.
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