MarkMonitor

The article author seems to have correctly identified MarkMonitor's business (it's on their web site, so that's not a tricky bit of journalism). However, note that *every* record in .COM is *already* in the hands of one company - the .COM registry operator, Verisign.

The US government has *already* issued DNS domain takedowns via this mechanism, so I'm not sure what additional problems that companies using MarkMonitor could add:

http://blog.easydns.org/2012/03/05/the-ramifications-of-u...

As for why these varied companies are using this service, my guess is that they do a good job and have kick-ass sales people. We don't expect companies to do *everything* themselves... Google and Microsoft both use light bulbs, but we wouldn't worry about the NSA "turning the lights out" if they both bought them from Philips...