Reminds me of Apple's "Sosumi" system sound.

Yeah, but the money should go anywhere but the parasitic hive of lawyers known as ICANN.

No thanks, I have two domains for my personal use and they shouldn’t cost me like two hundred bucks a year, that’s insane to pay a middleman for that.

In my country's TLD there were a lot of domains that were parked when it was free to register and then they became available.

PoW is a great proven way to combat fraud also.

Right now attackers can create a new domain and a new identity for 10USD, whether a phishing domain or a malicious brand.

That said, there's a lot of TLDs nowadays, and arguably what made .com popular was this precise price combination, which should only be adjusted for inflation, and arguably to adjust for exhaustion of names.

If you want to experiment with TLDs with higher cost of entry, go ahead and find another TLD, or setup an LLC with your domain and distinguish yourself from your competitors.

Ownership costs of the domain names is certainly NOT the correct tool control the problem of domain squatting. Some players like rich individuals or big companies will still have enough wealth to squat as many domains as they like. Meanwhile, others with legitimate needs like citizens of low-income countries and small enterprises, will be priced out of the market.

Keep in mind that domain names aren't used just for naming web sites or services. It's a distributed metadata distribution system with several other uses like mail server config, numerous TXT record types, WKD etc. If you take the stance that only the affluent should be allowed to access those services, it will defeat the purpose of the entire system.

The real problem with the DNS is that its design makes it amenable to economic exploitation. It's true that the system takes economic resources to maintain. I'm fine with paying that cost and don't believe that it would make domain names unaffordable. But ICANN and the others are certainly demonstrating increasingly rent seeking behavior lately.

I look at the five year or ten year registration rate. Also, I register it for the max duration possible, which is five or ten years, so at least I won't get extorted in that time.

>Generally, my advice would be to stick to country code TLDs.

Why? Unless you're talking about the country code of the same country you are operating in, (mis)using ccTLDs is basically gambling your domain's survival on the generosity of the country or even the very survival of the country itself. See Mali taking back .ml domain for a recent example.

Just stick to .net, .org or maybe .com for stability sake with only slightly higher but capped pricing.

> Any reason to think that the ultimate effect of this fee hike won't be the increased cost of domain names?

Any reason to think that it would be more than 2 cents?

A domain costs ~$10. ICANN used to take 18 cents and now it's 20 so maybe domains will cost $10.02.

ICANN requires accurate personal information from you which is worse than what a Google account requires. A competitor to ICANN could be more private by not requiring a dox of everyone who wants a domain.