I am shocked at the proposal to increase annual charges for maintenance of existing .com domains (or any other domains for that matter.) There is not clear reason, in fact, that there are any significant costs in maintaining a domain after its registration which justify annual renewal fees of any significant amount.   One can argue why the first registration might have a cost, but the cost is much lower in subsequent years, so much lower that it can be argued that a basic fee should cover many years or even a lifetime. Of course, it costs money to remain the core servers for a TLD to respond to requests for where the server is for any subdomain, and to respond to much rarer whois requests.   A bulk of the cost of continuing a domain is the cost of billing for the additional year, or so we would see it if we calculated. Domains vary.  While the domain "google.com" is fetched extremely frequently, it is also cached almost everywhere, but even so, small domains that are rarely referenced incur extremely low costs to maintain and serve.    It might be reasonable to assess an annual charge, even an increasing annual charge, for a high use domain, but for low-use domains, there should be no annual cost at all.  Instead, cost should come only when wishing to change data, and even then only if the change is unusual and not automated.   The cost for the computers is trivial and dropping with time on Moore's Law curves.  It is only the cost of programming and sysadmin which increase with time. For the latter, if more revenue is needed, make it for new registrations in a domain, not the maintenance of old ones.