Jay Westerdal from Name Intelligence, Inc. has run the numbers, and based on the current growth rate of the .COM zone file and the expected escalation of .COM registry-level prices in the proposed new contracts, Verisign will be pulling in over a billion annually (that's $1,150,641,387.77, to be precise) by the year 2012.

The next, harder question is what is the delta between the revenue to be generated under the proposed new contracts and the revenue generated if .COM were put out for a competive bid?

As George Kirikos points out here, Tucows has offered to run .COM for $2.00 a name. At that price, Verisign's annual monopoly profit in 2012 would be $903,745,689.52.

Okay, you're skeptical; after all, Tucows' proposal was presented at an open microphone and not in a binding bid. So instead take the Afilias ($3.25) bid for .NET. (Proposed pricing on the Sentan, DENIC, and CORE++ bids was confidential...or I just couldn't find it.). Assume that by 2012, inflation would have required Afilias to raise the price by $1.00. (You also could assume that, as with most technology services, the price would actually decline over time as the costs of providing the services were driven down by the declining costs of infrastructure and bandwidth.) At $4.25, Verisign's monopoly rent for 2012 would be $626,094,278.99.

Any answer to the question I posed above though is, of course, pure speculation. We won't be able to measure the delta between Verisign's revenue and a competitor's revenue unless we put the registry out to bid. And, I suppose, that's precisely the point of my central complaint about the new agreements.