I feel like there is a conspiracy going on in the domain name registry system that no one is talking about.

If any of you have renewed a domain name in the past couple of years you have seen the tremendous increase in prices; sometimes with several hundreds of percents of increases.

The registrars will just tell you it's out of their control because the domain registry has decided that your domain name is now considered premium.

My questions are:

Who are these domain registry people? How did they get the right to determine how much domain names are worth? How does it cost so much money just to store some domain name fields in a database?

What is really going on here? Where is all this money going? Who is getting rich for keeping a database up to date?

Can anything be done about it?