I'm wondering if anything legally prevents Verisign or a registrar from saying "screw it, we're selling every domain name under our control and then shutting down our business." The total assets of Verisign and all of the .com registrars are surely far less than the value of all of the .com domains. Heck, the value of the FANG domains alone is probably worth more than all registrars combined. If Verisign transferred technical control of all .com domains to another party, I guess that would effectively result in a fork of the entire DNS system, assuming the rest of the root name server operators didn't go along with it. But could Verisign legally get away with it?

In the france.com case, presumably the owner of the domain was paying Web.com for the domain, and they allegedly received no compensation from Web.com when it was transferred. Seems like a pretty blatant breach of contract to me. Why isn't Web.com being sued? Suing them indirectly via Verisign doesn't make sense.