Perhaps the message here is that you get what you pay for. For a rock bottom price, You get rock bottom service. There are registrars that charge considerably more and provide considerably more service.
There just isn't enough hierarchy in the DNS. Back when I was running my own ISP, I gave hosting customers free domain names like bobscafe.myisp.net, and fredshardware.myisp.net. That was a rockbottom price but because it was bundled with another product and FULLY UNDER MY CONTROL, I could do it for free. It cost more money, $50 I believe, to register a name like myisp.net. But unfortunately, it was darn near impossible to register a new TLD unless you were a small country. That is where the problem started. The charging structure should have been hierarchical so that people could register a new TLD (4 chars or more) for $1 million, and a new second level domain for $1000. That would have driven smaller businesses to 3rd level domain names which would probably range from free-with-hosting-service to $5 a year with DNS hosting thrown in. Now we have this horrible flat system where 3 char TLDs are free but require a bloated and expensive evaluation process, 4 char and greater TLDs do not exist, and everyone is crammed in on the 2nd level with far too many trying to pretend that they have a TLD inside .com. Blechhh! Only one registry out there http://www.nic.name/ is even doing third level registrations and most ISPs no longer give out meaningful third level names, just stuff like cs182365536663.myhosting.net and the like. What ICANN is missing, sorely missing, is an office of the CTO which would look at naming and addressing *ARCHITECTURE* and advise the board and ICANN councils. Eventually, we could have some intelligent discussion of a better way to structure this whole thing and then we would at least have a goal that we could work towards in fits and starts. Instead of the floundering that happens today. I remember when we had the IAHC and it seemed like we really would have some system that was based on sound network architectural grounds. Unfortunately, ICANN was formed to wrestle with the political issues and left the technical issues sitting in a cloud of dust back at the busstop. --Michael Dillon