It's not that they can't pay, but that no one offers them the anonymity they want at any price.
I don't see how you can reach that conclusion. It's true, none of the high volume registrars offers a meaningful anonymity service. The WHOIS privacy service my registrar offers costs 17 cents a month, and that's about what it's worth. But all that shows us is that there's a race to the bottom in the registrar business to offer the least service for the lowest price. On the other hand, if I really wanted to register a domain and run a web site anonymously, I don't think it would be at all difficult. I'd hire a lawyer in some place like the BVI or the Seychelles as a nominee, have him set up the domain and web hosting on my behalf, and tell him to ignore any third party questions. If I were really serious, I would start by setting up a bank account with a number and password and pay the lawyer out of that, so the lawyer wouldn't even know who I was. This costs more than 17 cents a month, but it would work and it doesn't require doing anything particularly difficult or exotic. There are also plenty of examples of informal but very secure anonymous domains, of which one of the best examples is SPEWS.ORG, an anti-spam web site. Someone presumably knows who's behind Spews, but a fair number of spammers have attempted to attack it with lawyers with no success. The site is hosted at a data center in California whose management I'm prettty sure do not know who Spews is either, with the content updates pushed at it through a chain of proxies. I don't deny that there are people who need anonymous content hosting and communication, but I have never understood the argument that it's a problem that ICANN has to solve. R's, John