> I mean isn't that essentially the deal you get when you're renting any property?

This isn't a model of internet that's good for anyone except the rent-seekers, and at this case the people who pay the cost are our most altruistic organizations.

In a larger sense, homelessness, housing inequality, and the rent being too damn high show that this isn't even a good way to do housing. If we're going to use real estate as a descriptive model for the internet, we should look at both the positives and the negatives and realize that real estate has fundamental problems we would like to avoid in the internet. Just because a model exists doesn't mean it's a good model to emulate.

If anything, I'd rather see DNS be free, with rules against domain squatting. The only reason I can see to associate a cost with registering a domain name is to prevent domain name squatting, and it's clear that cost is a larger barrier to good actors (actual domain users) than to bad actors (domain squatters).

It's a broken social contract; more akin to re-zoning that apartment out of existence after you lived there for 20 years.

And for a profit motive, targeting the segment of the neighbourhood least able to complain, defend themselves or move.

This is more like you buying your house outright. Then after 20 years the registry of deeds decides to start demanding a stiff yearly maintenance fee, without which they'll remove your deed from their books and allow new registrants to substitute their own in its place.

That's silly. This is more like a map charging you to list your address. You make it sound like not owning wikipedia.org suddenly means they lose all their servers.

This is literally losing your address.

In my example you still own the house itself, just like a website still owns the servers. But you've lost the foundation it relies upon.

They're called registries for a reason.