Unsustainable Debt Many pensions for state and local public sector workers have amassed large levels of debt. The aggregate level of unfunded pension liabilities (the gap between future promised benefits and future revenues) across the US was $4.998 trillion USD in 2019, assuming a 3.25% discount rate. For perspective, that means the total pension debt in the US is slightly higher than Germany’s PPP-adjusted GDP as of 2021. As a proportion of the 2019 economy, the pension debt was 23.

The Market Structure At the center of the domain name marketplace is ICANN, the non-profit entity managing the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). The US government created IANA in 1988 to manage the allocation of IP addresses and the DNS root zone. Below the IANA are domain name registries. These are entities that control a particular top-level domain (TLD), such as com or net. Domain name registries are wholesalers for domain name registrars, retail marketplaces for domain names.

Market Failure Many Americans pay too much for slow internet with terrible customer service and poor coverage. In local markets, where market concentration matters most, there is often only one broadband provider; in 2018, the FCC found that 30% of Americans have only one broadband provider, and 13% have zero. The telecommunications sector is a natural monopoly: fixed costs are high, marginal costs are low. It’s expensive to start an internet service provider and cheap to add a new subscriber, giving the incumbent provider a huge advantage.