Personally I've always found that to be a bad idea. How about charging say $500 for domain registration and putting that money into good projects on the net. You'd get far less squatters, people would be more likely to actually use domains they have, and you'd get some revenue to do good work with.
I would have. But I would only have bought domain names for things that would actually make money, or be worth it in some other way.
The currently system, you have maybe 5% of registered domain names actually in use. The other 95% are being sat on by extortionists trying to extract money from people for them.
SSL certs cost more than that.
Can you think of any other system where you can buy something for a nominal price, and then sell it for what it's actually worth?
US$500 for a .com would have set back widespread adoption of the internet immensely, maybe even fatally.
And they pay for it now because it's established that the internet is essential for doing business, but if domains had cost US$500 from the start we might not be in that position now.
Hiking up domain name costs makes sense only because we live with an internet that was developed without ridiculously high domain name costs.
Raising the cost now would be futile - it would actually make all the people hoarding domains a huge pile of money.