On the desk today · VeriSign
Every .com on earth pays rent. One company collects.
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The Toll Booth at the
Center of the Internet
Warren Buffett once described his ideal business as a toll bridge. "In an inflationary world, a toll bridge would be a great thing to own," he said. "You built it in old dollars and you don't have to keep replacing it."
He wasn't speaking about VeriSign. But he might as well have been. Berkshire Hathaway started buying shares in 2012. By early 2025, it owned nearly 14% of the company.
I typed a web address into my browser this morning. It took less than a second. The page loaded. I didn't think about what happened in between — and I bet you didn't either, the last time you did the same thing. But somewhere in that fraction of a second, a system run by a company in Reston, Virginia, looked up the address and pointed my browser to the right place. That company was VeriSign.
Most people think VeriSign is a tech company. It's not. It's a toll booth — bolted to the foundation of the internet. And you've been paying the toll your whole online life without knowing it.
VeriSign operates the registry for every .com and .net domain name on earth. It doesn't sell domains to the public. It doesn't build websites. It doesn't run ads. It does one thing: it maintains the master directory. When someone registers or renews a .com domain through any registrar — GoDaddy, Namecheap, anyone — a wholesale fee goes to VeriSign. Every single time.
Jim Bidzos founded VeriSign in 1995 as a spinoff from RSA Data Security, the company that pioneered public-key cryptography. The original business was digital certificates — the padlock icon in your browser. But over the years, VeriSign shed everything else. It sold off its security business, its payment processing, its messaging division. What remained was the registry. The purest toll booth on the internet.
In 2025, VeriSign collected $1.66 billion in revenue — up 6.4% from the year before. Operating income hit $1.12 billion. That's a 67.7% operating margin. The company produced $1.07 billion in free cash flow. It did all of this with 928 employees. That works out to roughly $1.8 million in revenue per person. I know of no other company this size with a workforce this small.
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Take at look at this stack of papers covered in black marker:
What you're looking at are the 750 White House files President Trump quietly "redacted" behind closed doors.
But what happened next was even more peculiar…
You see, directly after deleting federal files that had been in place since Jimmy Carter was in office…
President Donald Trump wrote a $300 million check to a controversial company located in Foothill Ranch, California.
Strangely enough, he didn't utter a single word about it to the cameras. Even more fascinating, it turns out, Trump's not acting alone…
If you follow the money trail…
Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates… even an up-and-coming tech titan who the late Charlie Munger referred to as, "the new emperor of the world"… have all poured billions into the same area.
The renewal rate for .com and .net domains hit 75.4% in the third quarter of 2025. Three out of four domain holders renewed. That number has been climbing — up from 72.2% a year earlier. Domains are like street addresses. Once a business prints its .com on a business card, a delivery truck, a storefront, the cost of switching is enormous. So they renew. Year after year.
Here's how the pricing works. VeriSign's wholesale fee for a .com domain is set by a contract with ICANN — the organization that governs internet naming — and overseen by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The current wholesale price is $10.26 per domain per year. In April 2026, VeriSign announced a 7% hike to $10.98, effective this November. Before 2021, the price was frozen at $7.85 for nine years. Then it rose to $8.39 in 2021. Then $8.97 in 2022. Then $9.59 in 2023. Then $10.26 in 2024. The domain industry protested each time. Domain holders paid it anyway.
Jim Bidzos said it plainly in the company's 2025 earnings release: "In 2025, we extended our track record of providing 100 percent availability for .com and .net domain name resolution to 28 years." Twenty-eight years without a single second of downtime. Every day, VeriSign's systems handle hundreds of billions of DNS lookups. Your phone. Your laptop. Your smart TV. Every time something connects to a .com address, it passes through VeriSign's system. I find that staggering. The company has never dropped the ball.
The flywheel here is quiet but relentless. The internet grows. New businesses launch. Each one needs a .com — still the default, still the mark of legitimacy. As the base grows, VeriSign's revenue grows. As prices rise under the ICANN contract, revenue grows again. And VeriSign takes the cash and buys back its own shares. Since 2012, the company has retired roughly 41% of its shares outstanding — from about 160 million to around 94 million. Fewer shares. Same toll booth. More cash per share.
WHY THIS WORKS
Government-backed monopoly. The ICANN registry agreement and the NTIA cooperative agreement give VeriSign the exclusive right to operate .com — with a presumptive right of renewal at each term's end.
Near-zero marginal cost. Adding one more domain to a registry of 173.5 million costs almost nothing. The infrastructure is already built. The toll just keeps collecting.
No customer concentration. No single registrar or domain holder matters. Revenue comes from 173.5 million individual registrations spread across the entire internet.
Contractual pricing power. The current agreement allows 7% annual price increases in four of the next six years. VeriSign has taken every increase it has been allowed.
What most people miss: VeriSign has no salesforce. No advertising budget to speak of. No customer service line for end users. It employs 928 people — total, worldwide — to run a $1.66 billion business. The internet itself is VeriSign's only distribution channel. Every .com domain ever registered is a customer that came to them, not the other way around.
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