I’m disappointed at the arbitrary decision-making that lets the registrars deem certain domains to automatically be “premium” and mark them up appropriately. It feels like that’s an additional layer of extortion on top (doubly so when the premium price carries into the full renewal price, too).
So, to be clear, the following tend to be seen as problems by their interested parties:
* withholding tons of domains to watch them go up in value means people can't get those domains (scammers, regular people)
* registries do not make a high price when they sell high-value domains (registries)
* there's only so many words / groups of words that are easily typeable (everyone)
* reducing scarcity reduces the value of digital real estate (domain squatters / traders)
Which of these issues / values / interested parties are more important to help than others, and what, if anything, should change?
I, personally, tend to be in favor of reducing the impact of scalpers by increasing total available volume. As a consequence, I'm also willing to accept some terms for the registries that they get to set higher prices for the most premium of their domains to:
* sweeten the pot for both registries and registrars to even support all these new domains
* reduce a squatter / trader / speculator / scalper's ability to sit on vast tracts of digital land.
I think first year premium pricing makes a lot of sense. I'm not sure what the average time to sell is for a domain investor, but say it's 10 years for an easy example.
If you go from a standard registration price of $12 / year to a first year premium of $132, you double the 10 year carrying cost of a domain. That, naively, means domain investors can only speculate on half as many domains.
By having a first year premium price and then dropping domains back into the 'standard' tier, you also leave registrants with a semblance of price protections via section 2.10c of the registry agreement. As-is, premium domains have zero guarantees when it comes to premium renewal pricing.
There's a lot of room between squeezing domain investors and asking registrants to pay $100-1000+ per year for premium domains.
It's the registries not the registrars that classify some domains as premium. I think they're a risky product because you don't even get the limited price protections provided by section 2.10c of the registry agreement, but there seems to be a market for them [1].
