CircleID

It's clearly an abuse of the ICANN's dominant position, and there are no serious grounds why such a decision should be necessary. I like your proposal "that once a domain is registered, the price for that domain is fixed for all renewals and transfers until and unless the registrant decides to abandon it."
Another solution could be to leave the choice to the registrant to register a domain for any time period between 50 and 100 years, even with some possibilities to pay it in several time, say every ten years for instance.
Anyway, as you rightly say "The simplest, fairest, and most obvious solution is to avoid it."
Jean-Marie

In most cases a domain name is a registered business or institution's identity. why it can not be treated likewise, will patent offices also follow the suit and start charging large amounts for popular names. I wonder how much the name Microsoft will fetch?

Dear John Levine,
Sorry to come back with your topic but I am not very clear for .info. As your info:
"The current contracts all set a fixed price per domain per years for each TLD. In .ORG it's $6, .BIZ it's $5.30, and .INFO it's $5.75. The proposed contracts keep the same prices, but let the registries change the prices unilaterally with six months' notice to the registrars (not the registrants.)"
I see that some domain registration companies are ofering(like: Lucky domain register) .info domain registration just $1.99/yr. So it means that they are loosing $3.76/domain/yr? if so it is realy huge cost.

The .info registry sometimes drops their wholesale price below the normal $6.15.  In this case, you're looking at a Godaddy reseller.  Godaddy routinely offers domains below cost as a loss leader, then makes it up with hosting and other add-on services.

Dear John Levine,
Thanks for your feedback. Now I understand clearly why luckyregister offer very low price event lower than Godaddy (most of cases, they reduce their profit!!!)