>a database small enough to be served from a computer from the 90s?

Putting ~170 million .com records into a RDBMS on a 90s computer is not enough infrastructure to serve ~746 billion DNS queries a day : https://www.verisign.com/about-us/

They don't use off-the-shelf Redis/PostgreSQL/MySQL and they have more uptime reliability than Github, AWS us-east-1, Anthropic Claude, etc.

Verisign may still overcharge for what they do but nevertheless, the computing infrastructure isn't trivial.

Most of the costs to provide digital services are salaries for the employees. You need engineers, support staff, lawyers, and some supporting roles like finance and security/compliance to meet the legal and contractual obligations of the service.

I wonder how much those operating costs would fall if you slashed salaries in half for all executives earning more than 4 million a year?

.de costs me 1,14 € per year for comparison (using Netcup). Denic is also non-profit.