Unless the price suddenly increases, say, 20000x.

Then you bite the bullet send out an email to your customers that you're moving domains and why, rip the band-aid off and move on with your life.

Unless you are hosting an email service and now all your users have to bite the bullet and send out emails to all their contacts, right.

Yep, there is no magic bullet to "thing I rent from someone else who has nigh complete discretion on price decides to price me out." You either regulate (which is what happened here that limits the price hikes to 7% yoy) or figure something out. If you can't leave or retaliate then you're basically proving explicitly why they're able to increase prices to the point of ruining you.

At a certain price you just pony up the $200k to ICANN become your own registrar and then actually own your domains.

The ICANN too can play this game, and ask some outrageous fee every year for your TLD

What if you have family or friends "familiar with your domain", but no paying customers?

Then you send them to the new website. It's about as much a bother as changing postal addresses.

mmhmm, and what happens to their email at the old address?

You tell people to use the new email. I don't understand this, if you make a thing the root of your identity then you have get everyone to migrate when it changes. There is no solution to this problem that doesn't involve implementing USPS mail forwarding for email.

There is a solution to the problem: price caps.

> You tell people to use the new email.

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.

I am not exactly happy about the price increase, but if the domain is this important, is $15/yr really that bad?

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.

The point is that they could raise the prices to $100+/yr if they damn well pleased. That's why the outrage, not over the 15 dollars

...charge them for dinner. -verisign

If you run a successful restaurant paying for "protection" to mobsters is a negligible cost to keep your business running (and your kneecaps not broken), but that doesn't make the racketeering acceptable...

If you run a successful restaurant and the landlord hikes your rent you can hardly move town.

Yes it’s rent seeking. It’s also the way capitalism works.

I can’t imagine a world where Google would move their primary domain from .com to .io. Over the past 20 years, I’ve witnessed numerous successful restaurants move locations due to rent hikes that are still in business in their new locations indicating continued success. I’m having trouble thinking of any major companies that have changed their domains after already being established and successful. Migrating domains feels a smidge different.

The reason it's different is that domains are so cheap and the price increases are so small. Why would a major company (or even a tiny company) change their domain over an increase of a dollar or two per year? It doesn't make sense.

If those restaurants' landlords had hiked their rent by a dollar 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 business, when the lease comes up for renewal.

The problem here is how justifiable is the change in prices, not the amount. If you raise prices because you really have to and I can't keep up, that's OK, that means that my business is not viable anymore, I need to charge more also or cut on expanses (or go out of business, which is also OK). But if you keep milking me for more money just because you can, as I have no other options, it's not OK at all.

Discord moved from discordapp.com to discord.com

I’m willing to bet discord.com was purchased from another owner/squatter once their business grew large enough to justify the expense.

There are some differences in the regulation of DNS assignments and real estate that makes this comparison not as direct as it may have been intended. Namely who can own the assets and if they are transferable. In real estate both of these lean much more on the open side, creating market forces which allows capitalism to work. Even if you yourself don't own property in e.g. NYC there is more than one investment company looking to buy and sell in NYC. In DNS these assignments enforce a system of renting and registry lock in. There is little room for capitalism to do its thing when avenues for competition are removed in this way.

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.

Well, you usually can simply move just for a few streets/blocks, it's very unlikely you'll have to move out of the town...But let's imagine if many little shops would be forced to move out of the town because of high rents - wouldn't the town come up with some regulations to prevent that?

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...