So it looks like Verisign has increased domain registration prices to over $10 for .coms:

 After 7/1/2013, prices change
    .com from $10.99 to $14.99 per year.
    .name, .ws and .biz from $12.99 to $14.99 per year.
    .ca from $11.99 to $14.99 per year.
    .org, .info, .net and .us from $9.99 to $14.99 per year.

Yep, this is old news, but it is great news!

In 2012 .coms were roughly $7, and they were $5 before that (working off of memory here)

You might think I am crazy to want to spend more money on domains, but there is a reason this is awesome. It crushes domain name squatters that have registered basically every word and pair of words in the dictionary. They work on the model that they can do that, and at lets say their average resale price is $5000; at $5 they need only need  to sell 1 in every thousand name pairs that they acquire. at $10, they have to sell 1 in every 500. If prices went up to $20, they would have to sell 1 in every 250, and so on.

Why do I say $5000? Well that is a number I have heard many times from these scumbags whenever I try to work out a deal with them. Probably they would take much less, but I figure it makes a good starting point to figure out what their trade off is. Unless they have mcdonalds.com, they are unlikely to get much more than that from most small businesses. So that is my magic number I use in my estimates of their risk/return.

What would happen if they jacked the prices up to $100? Well, name squatters would become nearly non-existant (1 in 50 every year isn't going to happen). If this was done a decade ago, flickr.com would have been instead called flicker.com (looks like they finally bought that domain off a squatter). People wouldn't sit on names they aren't using, and the internet would have domain names that really mean something. 

On top of it, the .com space would be more commercial. JohnSmith.name would be used for people. .org would be used for orgs, and .net would be used for networks. Who wants to have a .com when only businesses would be using them.

This is a yearly cost, and if I have a business, $100 per year is cheap to have a good name for it. $15 a year which is the proposed amount, well that is dirt cheap, and if it means a better name spaced internet, then so be it.