The incentives here are perverse: the registry knows that changing domain names has a high switching cost; we should not have the "market" dynamics encouraging them to start, effectively, extorting domain owners. "That web presence you built up? It would be a shame if anything were to happen to it…"
I actually thought there were ICANN rules against this sort of thing.
The real estate analogy is good. Find a cheap town!
Typically the registry won't arbitrarily increase the renewal price of specific domains during a period of time where the domain is owned by the same individual. That seems like an incredibly scummy practice.
Domain names aren't something you can just "move out" of like housing if your landlord decides to increase the price one year by over 6000%. They represent identity, discoverability and trust. By arbitrarily increasing the renewal price like this, the registry is constructively repossessing your online identity. It's the same as if they suddenly took your domain from you and put it up for auction for their own benefit.
Registrars (not registries) can get away with increasing their prices, but that's different because you can always switch registrars to one that charges a lower markup over the registry. You can't switch registries without switching your domain name entirely.
… uh, it's not even possible to move out of that that easily, either. (Although a 6000% increase would certainly do it.) I think landlords are (also?) very much aware of switching costs in their yearly price uppings.
Amazon and Cloudflare does not as far as I know.
I think I am done getting cutesy domains for projects and will just use subdomains going forward to avoid this kind of headache.
edit: One of the things I wanted to put on that domain was an ngrok like service targeting regions where ngrog is high latency, because I could really use that myself.
So I had the domain for a year, I specifically went out of my way to find a domain that was not premium, but when it came time to renew it was marked as premium, and when I tried to move it I got error messages like “can’t move domain because it’s premium”.
.sbs registry has done it with my domain in 2021.
.xyz has done it another one of my domain few years ago.
None of my regular old tld domains, and cctld domains experienced it.
-footnote- I used to buy domains for my own use only, my family names & stuff, never for resale or business or anything.
Did the registrar email you at some point to tell you that they are no longer able to renew your domain at the standard rate, because the registry determined it to be a premium domain?
I usually stay on top of my domains, I found the way higher price for .sbs & .xyz when trying to renew them, at different times.
Every TLD is operated by a registry that has a monopoly over that TLD. .dev's registry is Google. .com and .net's registry is Verisign.
GoDaddy is a registrar which resells domains from the registries. You can register .dev domains on GoDaddy just like you can register .com and .net domains.
The bulk of the registration fee goes to the registry. What keeps .com and .net prices reasonable is not that there's no monopoly - Verisign totally has a monopoly - but that Verisign's registry agreement with ICANN forbids this kind of pricing shenanigans whereas Google's registry agreement for .dev doesn't. But I'm sure that when Verisign's registry agreement is up for renewal they will try to renegotiate this.
GoDaddy is the registry for .biz[0].
That is, GoDaddy was started as a registrar, but the company integrated vertically with a registry division, so it plays both roles now. This was approved by ICANN.