Agree with all of these statements except this one:

> Verisign will suck about $3 billion dollars out of the world economy just by having some powerful friends at ICANN.

It's not a zero-sum game.

If Verisign manages to extract $3B from the poverty-stricken folks who are buying up .com domains, it doesn't just disappear (unless, of course, Verizon takes it in cash and sets it on fire in the basement.)

That $3B will then be spent on whatever pet projects Verizon feels like spending it on, thus re-injecting into the global economy.

I personally think that Verisign should have to compete to run the .com registry, just like how we do FCC spectrum auctions, but hand-wavy statements like "suck about $3 billion dollars out of the world economy" do not help make that case.

Apologies for the source of this, I couldn’t find a neutral organization hosting the excerpt. https://mises.org/library/broken-window In short - the $3 billion would be spent on improving the local economy of those individuals who would otherwise retain the money. Technically nothing is being destroyed, but the point of the article stands.

The term for this is "rent seeking". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Suck it out of the world economy? Does Verisign collect their profits and throw it all in a furnace?

What point are you trying to make? I think you know they don't burn the money.

That's it's not lost or sucked out of the economy. It is transferred to new owners who will spend it and it will go to new owners and so on and so forth.

Agreed, it's not really any different than an increase in taxes. Tax money does get spent, so it's not really lost at all.

They'll pass the value and savings onto the customer, obviously.

Verisign going to be the next rocket stonk