To contrast, the .io space entered at what, $50 USD? and continues to be expensive to maintain year over year, providing a natural monetary resistance barrier to the same three groups of people (spammers, squatters and hackers) and seems to enjoy a healthy respect amongst internet users; most consider it a tech-type domain space with tech worker dollars buying the domains for real sites, I even owned one for a brief period when they came out.
I don't know which point you were trying to make, but as far as I could tell that's the business model that's being followed by all vanity gTLDs.
The only nuance I've noticed is that there are a bunch of domains being sold for peanuts with the caveat that after a year or two it's price is hiked to somewhere in the range of 30-50$.
Nothing, absent a provision in the registration contract to the contrary, except the risk of everyone fleeing.
> Any laws preventing this?
No. Remember that [ccTLD - I originally wrote gTLD but those are a different thing, as corrected below] are assigned to the countries that they represent (or, in this case, the country that holds sovereignty over the named territory) so subject to their jurisdiction and there’s no real motivation for a country to pass such a law.
I registered a ".plus" domain for $2 a year for two years. It made a decent domain hack for a project.
After two years, the renewal price became $20-ish. The project had a new name by then, so I didn't renew.
The same happened for a personal Chinese domain (.网站 I think) that I had for a couple of years while I was learning Chinese.
Bad image and massively losing the original customers.
>Any laws preventing this?
No, the gTLDs are allocated by ICANN which is a non-profit based in the US. As a whole, the domain name market follows very economically liberal rules.
I just remember that ICANN board was part of a recent .org story [1].
Domains are dominated by the long tail. Some people have built multi-million dollar brands off the TLD, but how do you raise prices to take advantage of that without losing the 100,000 other registrations that will just churn away?
In your example there's a fair bet they'd lose 99% of their existing user base, and kill any new use acquisition.
Is there anything to stop them from raising prices on the most established domains while keeping the long tail at the same price?
E.g., some of the new TLDs already have "premium" pricing for dictionary word domains, is there anything stopping them from raising the price on dictionary domains after someone has started using them?
You are pretty much bound to what the registry can do. Take it away, hike the price up, etc.