I always wondered why do we have to pay for domain names annually. Now I understand where that money actually goes. There are 340+ million registered domain names. [1] Annual ICANN subscription price of a domain name is about 10$. That is a guaranteed annual revenue of 3.4bn USD and consistently growing and no one can give ICANN a competition because effectively it's a monopoly. That is a lot of money for a "non-profit". We have reached a serverless computing era where paying for compute/storage for a small service is becoming cheaper than owning a domain name and the price for "buying" domains hasn't changed in years. People are so used to the standard domain pricing that they are willing to pay that subscription amount. All of this while executives of a non-profit get filthy rich. Me feeling unfair about it is not enough to change the market, but I sure do derive some business learning from this.

[1] https://investor.verisign.com/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=98...