Yeah. I wonder why this cannot be reversed really?
First domain registration should cost more.. 50 USD maybe? Dunno.
And then, when you want to extend the domain, price should be
around 5 times lower?
Most of the new gTLDs that are using this heavy discounting model would not be commerically viable with normal .COM registration fees.
It is a very cynical business model that relies on a very small percentage of discounted domain names renewing at full fee (typically between $10 and $30) so that in addition to the registry covering costs on each first year registration, it makes more on a renewal for the second year. The typical renewal rate is 5% or below and it like sieving for plankton. One of the new gTLDs has a renewal rate for 2022 new registrations of 1.53%. It is regularly priced at less than $1 per new registration.
When the heavy discounting business model started being widely used by struggling new gTLDs, a lot of the abusive registrations shifted from .COM/NET because the economics of DNS Abuse had changed. The .ORG registry had been working on cleaning its zone and had stopped heavy discounting offers. It is now in a much stronger position than either .COM or .NET in terms of renewals.
Most registrants in a country will either consider their local ccTLD (if outside the US) as a first choice and then the .COM as a second choice. Market awareness and familiarity generally play a larger part in driving registration trends than pricing.
The .US ccTLD is up against the .COM in the US market and the .COM is the de facto US ccTLD. The .US has had discounting promotions before and most of the discounted registrations did not renew.
Those who want to use it for legal activity will chew that little CAPEX.
That brings up another problem. When a registry starts to use a heavy discounting model with its gTLD, it kills development and usage rates in the gTLD because the gTLD gets a reputation for being a junk TLD and the rising level of spam and phishing cause the gTLD to be blocked on mailservers. It is very difficult for a gTLD to recover from this. One of the earlier heavy discounting new gTLDs had about 2 million domain names in its zone at the peak. Five years later, approximately 2K were still in the zone. A new registry team took over the gTLD and other Famous Four Media gTLDs in 2018 and they have still not recovered.
A high registration fee will act as a barrier to entry for a TLD and it will take longer for the TLD to grow. Prospective registrants will often opt for the cheaper close alternative. (Registrants and tend to be aware of their local ccTLD, .COM, .NET, .ORG and perhaps the ccTLD for adjacent countries.) For much of the late 1990s and early 2000s, that was .COM rather than the ccTLDs. Many ccTLDs were run by university Computer Science departments that couldn't compete. In the mid 2000s, the ccTLDs started to improve due to ICANN's failure to deal with problems in .COM/NET/ORG and abuse of the Add Grace Period.
Even with the DotCOM bubble, the initial fee of $50 per year kept registration volume relatively low but it was a very different market compared to today's more global one. The advent of the registrars model and its competition reduced the registration and renewal fees and helped grow the market. The problem today is that the growth in .COM has plateaued.
There is web usage in the .US ccTLD but it is at a lower rate than in .COM or in European ccTLDs. A lot of .US registrations are brand protection registrations and redirect to the registrant's primary website in .COM. It isn't a truckstop or gateway TLD like .EU where there are more redirects to other TLDs than active websites.
Regards...jmcc