.com has been run by Verisign since before the gTLD nonsense
.com is however not owned by Verisign. They can't just set arbitrary prices without ICANN approval.
ICANN allows anyone to create a domain. You need to pay a bunch of fees to register it and service it but it is not that much. In this case I believe Google created these domains for internal tools and they have owned them ever since.
You also need a time machine as they're not currently accepting applications.