You seriously wouldn't have bothered? You can't think of any way on gods earth you could ever afford $500 a year for your domain name? Settling for myname.somecompany.com wouldn't have been acceptable to you?

I would have. But I would only have bought domain names for things that would actually make money, or be worth it in some other way.

The currently system, you have maybe 5% of registered domain names actually in use. The other 95% are being sat on by extortionists trying to extract money from people for them.

SSL certs cost more than that.

Can you think of any other system where you can buy something for a nominal price, and then sell it for what it's actually worth?

It's tricky to make a living doing web development if all your clients go 'HOW MUCH FOR A DOMAIN?!' and run away.

US$500 for a .com would have set back widespread adoption of the internet immensely, maybe even fatally.

and now, they just go "HOW MUCH FOR AN SSL CERT???" and then buy one anyway.

Only the people that need one, which isn't everyone.

And they pay for it now because it's established that the internet is essential for doing business, but if domains had cost US$500 from the start we might not be in that position now.

Hiking up domain name costs makes sense only because we live with an internet that was developed without ridiculously high domain name costs.

Raising the cost now would be futile - it would actually make all the people hoarding domains a huge pile of money.