Somebody put in a proposal to run the .org registry at cost for $2/domain/year a while back, but it was rejected because their infrastructure was only something like triple-redundant Postgres instead of quintuple-redundant Oracle. This is known as a "beauty contest"; ICANN picks whoever has the most over-engineered solution and when you cross that with "cost plus" thinking leftover from the military-industrial complex you end up paying $9.