if they became the owners, they wouldn't have to re-up every period of time.
Look at it this way. Until a domain is registered, nobody owns it. When you pay to register a domain, you aren't buying it on the registrar's behalf.
When you register a domain name you are purchasing that domain name for the duration of the registration period. You own it. Period.
The registrar's role is to handle certain technical functions such as providing PTR service, WHOIS records, and to expire the domain when the registration period expires. They don't own it, and the cost of registration is meant to cover their operating costs.
This is also why domains are so cheap. A .com is about $10 per year. That's basically nothing, when you compare to other things you pay for. If there weren't a recurring fee, people would never give up their unused domain names.
I don't have the answer here; curious to find out what everyone thinks.
I could see a registrar telling you they don't want to do business with you any more; they should have to give you some time to transfer it out. However, it's still a dangerous precedent that people on all sides of the political spectrum would do well to heed as a warning of censorship to come.
If that were the case, letting it expire would result in it just being dead rather than available for others to register.
No, it was always intended that when someone no longer needs a domain name, it would be returned to the pool of available domain names for others to make use of. This is in the very spirit of the internet.
I mean the internet is a new world which is only about 40 years old. It was created by a lot of really smart guys who mostly don't care about the "traditional market rules" and it was created a specific way to follow specific philosophies one of which is when a domain name is no longer being used it should be available for other people to purchase.
It's not exactly counter-culture, but it's completely different. The distributed infastructure, the emphasis on putting equal power in the hands of the smallest operators rather than focusing it on the largest corporations, none of these things mesh with how the offline world has been operating for centuries.
People who were aware of the internet before it was cool remember these details.
I don't know how to make it more clear for you than that.
It's safe to say that it has not been settled yet. But it is in everyone's best interest to do our best to adhere to the intentions of the original creators.