NSI, which was part of the same company as VeriSign during the time they were involved with the theft of our domain name, used it's government granted monopoly over the entire domain name registration market for years to get away with charging an absurd $100 registration fee for every domain name and $50/year after the first two years to keep it renewed without having to worry about competition. Now that there have been enough class action lawsuits filed against them to partially open up the market for competition from other registrars, this story is an example of how they are apparently using their power to block customers from choosing to leave them, and to retaliate against them if they attempt to. I say "only partially" open the market because Verisign is still granted an underlying monopoly by being the domain registry for several key top level domains, such as .com and .net. All registrars must pay them up to $7.85/year for every registered domain.