Even in the developing world, double the current renewal price would be nothing for a company who owns one or two domains. Do you think the literal poorest people in the world are creating startups or even websites? The demand you're conjecturing just doesn't exist.

GP said "developing or poorer", not "literal poorest". You're creating a strawman to shoot it down.

I can only speak for myself, but if prices doubled overnight, owning a domain would not be feasible for me because I don't conduct business or earn income on the domain I own, and the only reason I went for this fairly obscure TLD is because it was the cheapest decent one I could afford. Some of us aren't "businesses", and unless you think we don't deserve a corner of the internet, you'll find there's tons of us.

Well talk about strawmanning, who said you couldn’t have a corner of the internet? There are plenty of TLDs that aren’t subject to the issues .com has.

Sorry but yes, if you’re not making enough money from your .com to pay (say) $50/year, I think it’s perfectly fine that you can’t use it for your random hobby project. The lost value that comes from .com being messed up is so much greater.

I thought your first two sentences were independent of each other and that you were talking about all TLDs. Sorry, probably a language barrier thing.

.com is very clearly commercial so what I had to say isn't applicable to it (which is why I mentioned I use a relatively obscure TLD like .site or .xyz).

Oh, no, I just meant businesses using .com for commercial purposes. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Of course they do? Not everyone builds a business for the whole world or expects a SV growth with pumped in money. 13 has value at plenty of places where people are able to build stuff.

The poorest people in the world are struggling to survive. They barely start start businesses at all, let alone those that need global reach via a .com. The people in developing countries who do need such things and do have such businesses can easily afford $50/y.

I don't agree with it what so ever because I've been at the same situation. Businesses, especially online, are not only made by some Silicon Valley of the local types. I'm sorry but everything you write comes from a place of privilege unless you think dot com should be reserved only for the richer parts of the world.

I’m an Aussie who cant/won’t afford the 1000x prices squatters want for domains. Reducing the overall cost for domains by increasing them.

Way to stereotype though.