philanthropicoctopus@thelemmy.club Yes. If a TLD has the so called “premium domains” feature then it can unilaterally decide that certain domains are worth more, based on their popularity. Then they’ll ask you to pay tens, hundreds or even thousands at renewal time, and if you can’t pay they will auction it away.
This isn’t something that registrars do, this is something that the entity that manages the TLD itself is doing.
For TLD’s without “premium domains” the TLD sets a single base price for all their domains. Registrars can demand more but there’s competition so someone will always sell it for closer to the base price, and if they change their price at renewal you can transfer to a different registrar.
You can’t do this with a premium TLD once they’re targeted your domain because the TLD forces all registrars to raise the price for your specific domain.
Bottom line, never buy from a TLD with premium domains.
All are that the first year. I had someone in person tell me how they were put on a severely increased price despite being on a domain that should be very cheap. Sadly I don’t recall who it was, so I can’t ask them for the details.
The jist iirc was their domain got popular (due to their website), so xyz decided it belonged to a higher price category.
This was definitely not 1.1111b specifically, but with a short search there I found reports that xyz has apparently decreased the scope of the 1.1111b category before, making the minimum length 6 instead of 3, and then refused renewals for people that had 3-digit domains under the old price.
So I would expect arbitrary price increases on 1.1111b too, it’s not something I’d rely on. xyz always has the right to charge whatever they want, so you are one policy decision away from switching everything with no notice or shelling out whatever they think they can charge.
Compared to say .com, where there is a rigid contract of what verisign can charge, mandating a single price categories, a set number of price increases with a set maximum increase, no difference between first year and renewal, …
Or .eu which is free and only has registrar fees, so you could just migrate to a different registrar.