I'm pretty confident the answer is no and these price increases just reflect the need for a handful of entities to charge more for an essential service with no viable alternative.
However, even with that DNS has been pretty distributed by design. Lowering system load at the top level to begin with.
Like some country code domains are managed by a pretty small number people to begin with. So it's not like you need a large amount of staff either.
It is hard to say what direction or price point is either optimal or fair.
People falsely equate any domain they can't register and doesn't have a website with squatting.
I get at least one angry email from someone a month trying to buy a domain that only has MX (mail) records. Another is a 3 letter .com I use for my internal lab environment, and I explicitly don't want it to resolve on the public Internet.
Maybe ICANN should specify a shorter internal lab domain (There's already .local for your use, which I would think is plenty short, even adding a prefix), but I would most certainly say that given there's only ~50,000 2 or 3-letter domains, the price for one should be high enough to make an individual flinch.
If you just were lucky and registered a 3 letter domain back in the 90s, why is it anyone else business? Let it be.
I have got a 5-letter domain myself that I keep a website of mine that never worked out online mostly for portfolio and because I really like the domain name. I've no plans to sell the domain or free it so others can register, even though it could indeed be more useful for some other stuff. Well, if someday I want to launch a company, I might as well brand it with this name. For the time being, it's no one's business.
Squatting isn't just with the purpose of reselling. It's an overloaded phrase, from "living in someone's building illegally" to "Holding onto a good with the intent of depriving others of it's use, driving the price up (particularly if you control a large portion of the limited resource)", which are, in many ways, exact opposites (The hobo sleeping in an abandoned property and the landlord underutilizing that property so they can benefit from the scarcity of land are both "squatting") I'd say that the mild foresight that 3 letter domains are useful and then holding on to one because, even though you're barely using it, you don't want to give it up - Yeah, that's squatting. It's a minor dick move, though I'd say that dumb stuff like littering newspapers or not tipping your waiter is probably the greater offense.
I'm also fine with how things are now, because I don't have any illusions that ICANN as currently stands would put that additional revenue to good use, but I'd like to see this treated... well, I'd compare it to water rights, but those are broken just as badly.
There's damage to the internet from "evicting" people from these domains. Broken links, etc. Sure, that doesn't apply in this "intentionally unused" case, but... who's currently incurring what damages? Why try to squeeze more dollars out of folks with these domain names? I'm suspicious of ideas to replicate the physical real-estate model of pushing people out through raising rents that seems to just benefit landlords and the already-wealthy.
We are living in the Internet and names are cheap. If for some historical reasons (I'd say, maybe even related to artificial scarcity), .com|.org|.net got more popular than they probably would, this is fine. gTLDS (generic top-level domains) are here now, and if they don't suffice, something else will eventually appear.
No? Yeah at one point a lot of us used that one, but it was never official and has long since been eaten by mDNS. And with ICANN happily selling off whatever TLDs anyone wants you can’t count on anything unused and unreserved either. Local only DNS TLD use has been explicitly discouraged if anything, which has long been intensely irritating and argued over. Ones like .test are reserved but aren’t intended and don’t read as being for permanent deployment purposes on intranets. Official req has been to buy a legit TLD and use that.
However, the distributed nature dns does protect against a lot blunders unless they persist for long enough for caches to invalidate.
The largest concern would be bad backups of registration records. However, last I checked ICANN requires tld operators to keep backups and also submit those backups daily to ICANN. Plus other things so if the company/org goes belly up for some reason ICANN can manage it till they find someone else.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/28/seven-peo...
In some ways, it seems like the potential risks warrant Verisign to have a strong financial incentive given the problems we've seen at PG&E (if Verisign can also be considered a utility). Also, it does serve as a north star in regards to properly compensating companies or individuals who provide important protocols, infrastructure layers, and FOSS projects. How much that should be though is an interesting question.
I don't like that administrators resort to blocking whole TLDs, and I don't like that there can be so much variation in profit between domains with no correlation to operational costs. Still, I can't say that it's purely a greedy move on their part. People do benefit from paying more.
> meaning that within 10 years, .COM domains could cost approximately 70% more than the current wholesale price of $7.85
Seems reasonable over 10y period?
That works out to roughly 2.9% per year, which is a bit above the current US overall inflation rate of 2.3%, but less than the US housing inflation rate of 3.2% [1]. I don't have an opinion on whether domain prices should increase with inflation, but the increase does seem to be in line with it.
It's almost like Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies... scarcity is built in to domains. At some point, they'll all be taken.
If you're going for something lower than 8 characters, odds are you're either paying thousands or buying something that's not .com.
Take your idea one step further, and they should start individually assessing each domain name, and charging the maximum possible. Google.com would cost a billion the first year. Then, it suddenly starts redirecting to Bing because MS outbid Google.
This hasn’t happened yet, but, as far as I can tell, there are no rules preventing such behaviour, only the ever-changing power dynamics.
This scenario has been a reason for me to avoid all these new TLDs. Because those are run by smaller organizations less susceptible to bad PR, I expected them to pioneer the shakedown.
Which leads to the question: which registrar would you trust most? Are there any that are contractually or, better yet, bound by law to limit increases to what’s reasonable? Absent such guarantees, maybe something like .eu is the safest? Despite common cynicism about politicians and money, I tend to expect them to shy away from controversial schemes to get rich quick, and to be far more susceptible to public pressure.