Class action targets Verisign and ICANN over .com pricing

A California registrant has filed a class action against Verisign and ICANN, alleging their registry agreements let Verisign maintain an illegal monopoly over .com and charge prices no competitive market would produce.

The case, in one paragraph

Plaintiff Jeff Kessler — the registrant of six .com domains — argues Verisign coerced ICANN into contract terms that keep .com wholesale pricing beyond the regulator's reach. The suit seeks a nationwide class of everyone who renewed a .com since September 4, 2022, plus a California class seeking damages. It asks the court to end the alleged anticompetitive conduct and to stop enforcing the contract provisions that restrict ICANN's ability to regulate .com wholesale prices.

(Our summary of the complaint — the full document is linked at the source below.)

What .com actually costs today

Whatever the courts decide, one thing is already public: first-year prices and renewal prices are two different products. Our live data across the 12 registrars we track:

• Hostinger: $0.01 first year → $19.99 renewal
• Porkbun: $11.08 = $11.08
• Namecheap: $11.28 → $18.48
• IONOS: $10.00 → $20.00
• SiteGround: $11.99 → $22.99

Captured in early September 2026, USD. Full snapshot for all 1,123 TLDs we track: dohohub.com/registrars.

Hostinger's $0.01 first year is the extreme case — the renewal is roughly 2,000× the intro price. Porkbun sits at the other end: registration equals renewal, which is what flat pricing looks like.

Why we are running this one

A filing is not a verdict. But it puts into one document what every renewal invoice already shows: the price of .com did not fall out of a competitive market — it comes from a contract between two organizations, and you meet it once a year. That is exactly why we track the renewal price next to the banner price, on one page.