Bill Hartzer wrote an article about a report issued by a group called Digital Citizens Alliance that was critical of domain investing. This is not the first time this organization took domain investing to task. In fact, Andrew Allemann wrote an article about it in 2020.
When looking at the report and the organization’s website, I noticed the Executive Director of this organization is Tom Galvin. The website notes that “Prior to founding 463 Communications, Tom served as Vice President of Government Relations and Communications at VeriSign, where he was responsible for driving strategy with policy makers regarding homeland security, Internet security and telecommunications policy.”
This caught my attention because of a recent NTIA release that alluded to prices charged by domain investors and domain registrars. “We also recognize that prices at both the wholesale level and downstream, including prices charged by resellers and substantial markups by warehousers, need to be addressed,” the release stated.
My opinion is that VeriSign is unhappy when a discussion about competition to manage the .com registry comes up, and the company would prefer to have the focus be on (unregulated) domain investor and domain registrar pricing.
