I can’t imagine a world where Google would move their primary domain from .com to .io. Over the past 20 years, I’ve witnessed numerous successful restaurants move locations due to rent hikes that are still in business in their new locations indicating continued success. I’m having trouble thinking of any major companies that have changed their domains after already being established and successful. Migrating domains feels a smidge different.
The reason it's different is that domains are so cheap and the price increases are so small. Why would a major company (or even a tiny company) change their domain over an increase of a dollar or two per year? It doesn't make sense.
If those restaurants' landlords had hiked their rent by a few dollars per year, they wouldn't have moved either. But it's not uncommon to see increases of thousands of dollars per month, even for a small restaurant, when the lease comes up for renewal.
The problem here is how justifiable is the change in prices, not the amount. If you raise prices because you really have to and I can't keep up, that's OK, that means that my business is not viable anymore, I need to charge more also or cut on expenses (or go out of business, which is also OK). But if you keep milking me for more money just because you can, as I have no other options, it's not OK at all.
There are some differences in the regulation of DNS assignments and real estate that makes this comparison not as direct as it may have been intended. Namely who can own the assets and if they are transferable. In real estate both of these lean much more on the open side, creating market forces which allows capitalism to work. Even if you yourself don't own property in e.g. NYC there is more than one investment company looking to buy and sell in NYC. In DNS these assignments enforce a system of renting and registry lock in. There is little room for capitalism to do its thing when avenues for competition are removed in this way.
Even seeming outs such as "invest in a gTLD" don't provide the opportunity. Aside from being the virtual equivalent of "why don't you just go build your hair salon 50 miles out of town where nobody owns anything yet for 1,000x the cost of a building in town?" gTLDs require being a well established organization, among other eligibility requirements, which creates a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
Both do have a 3rd component of "group good overhead" but the IANA fees of ~18 cents don't seem to be the problem so there's no sense in comparing/contrasting these differences.
Well, you usually can simply move just for a few streets/blocks, it's very unlikely you'll have to move out of the town...But let's imagine if many little shops would be forced to move out of the town because of high rents - wouldn't the town come up with some regulations to prevent that?
Capitalism is fine when it benefits the overall economy, but when it starts self-imploding because of interests of a few, then government jumps in usually - that's why we have anti-monopoly laws, because monopoly hurts the progress...
Yes it’s rent seeking. It’s also the way capitalism works.