It is bothers me that the monopoly is excused this way.
At a certain price you just pony up the $200k to ICANN become your own registrar and then actually own your domains.
Easier said than done. For most people that probably means updating literally hundreds of sites (and better hope all of those have a way to change your email). Not to mention telling your contacts to use the new email, and hope they don't forget and send an important email to the wrong domain.
Like I'm flabbergasted at people complaining about the burdens of doing something nobody would do, because the cost isn't worth the effort.
Now if they raised prices to $100+/yr I could imagine, but $15/yr is negligible costs.
Yes it’s rent seeking. It’s also the way capitalism works.
If those restaurants' landlords had hiked their rent by a few dollars per year, they wouldn't have moved either. But it's not uncommon to see increases of thousands of dollars per month, even for a small restaurant, when the lease comes up for renewal.
Even seeming outs such as "invest in a gTLD" don't provide the opportunity. Aside from being the virtual equivalent of "why don't you just go build your hair salon 50 miles out of town where nobody owns anything yet for 1,000x the cost of a building in town?" gTLDs require being a well established organization, among other eligibility requirements, which creates a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
Both do have a 3rd component of "group good overhead" but the IANA fees of ~18 cents don't seem to be the problem so there's no sense in comparing/contrasting these differences.
Capitalism is fine when it benefits the overall economy, but when it starts self-imploding because of interests of a few, then government jumps in usually - that's why we have anti-monopoly laws, because monopoly hurts the progress...
A real-life "we have TLDs at home" from someone who has probably never seen the related meme.
Seriously. It’s not an issue of brand recognition. It’s an issue of decades of basic phishing defense.
Would you trust myshop.com or myshop.xyz more?
All TLDs in this case would be equivalent to all car brands.
(All car brands => Ford) <=> (All TLDs => .com)(As an aside, I'd pay for a better-curated DNS infrastructure. For instance, google's font domains of whatever could just resolve to something federated, and that has TLS certs that are trusted by the alternative infrastructure. Google's chain of trust could be on a certificate revocation list.)
Exceeding the current limits and the abuses that derive from it is certainly something extremely difficult to achieve, but I think there's a market in trying to fix the status quo.