As someone privacy minded, how do you manage domain ownership? I've recently jumped into this world myself and I feel as though most registrars are unsavory in some way.
Oh, what aspect of domain ownership? I mean, yeah it's true, the whole market around domains is super sketchy and basically unethical IMO, domains should be like $5-10/year at most, for any TLD. I'm using NameCheap, which I fortunately haven't heard any horror stories about, but yeah, I don't have any more faith in them than anyone else, I just got an awesome deal to move my domains over years ago and they seemed to have a good reputation at the time.
I use NameCheap as well for similar reasons -- their pricing seems as fair as it gets in the domain business, and they haven't tried anything scummy enough to make me switch providers.
One thing I don't understand: why can't I pay $100 today and get some kind of proof of ownership for life? Is that just impossible with the domain system as it is?
> why can't I pay $100 today and get some kind of proof of ownership for life?
Because Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is everything in this business, and the registries (Verisign etc) are monopolies for a given TLD.
The registrar's minimum cost to hold annual registration on a .com domain is a bit higher than $9.15 ($8.97 to Verisign registry, $0.18 plus accreditation and variable fees to ICANN).
The rest of your registration fee is revenue to the registrar (minus payment processing fees, and plus any upsells).
Registrar pricing is all over the place. GoDaddy used to be low-cost, high upsell. Now they are on the high end of normal pricing (and still high upsell! Don't use GoDaddy!).
NOTE: Cloudflare apparently absorbs the accreditation and variable ICANN fees without passing them on to the customer. These fees total ~$20-45K/yr depending on domain volume -- assume the maximum for Cloudflare. So they are losing a very small amount of money with every domain they register. Loss leader, etc, I'm sure it's a smart marketing write off for them.
Oddly enough, Google Domains is the least bad in this regard. They have an interest in not compromising their control of .dev and it's enough of a small potatoes activity that it can escape subversion into a profit center.
