I think it needs to be tied to a consequence for it to all fit together. The stated price would be effectively a binding offer to sell at any time.
It reminds me of the "24 Hours of Lemons" joke racing series. The rules require participants to send in a car worth less than $500. To enforce this, the operators reserve the right to buy any participating vehicle for $501. If you act in bad faith and under-price your entry, you get it bought out from under you.
The problem is that works well for enforcing an upper bound on price. You need a different model for enforcing a lower bound. Maybe the renewal fees are scaled according to the stated price to provide a reason not to claim everything is worth millions.
I still don't understand how this would result in what the commenter says.
I have domain names that I've been using for 20 years or so. They are not for sale, and will never be for sale. If I'm forced to put a price on them, that price is binding, and I'm not allowed to set it so high that nobody would ever pay it, is that not the same thing as forcing me to relinquish my domain names? Doesn't that eliminate all of the value of a domain name?
I'll pay whatever the "buy it now" price is for your personal email domain. Within a few hours I can get password resets for all your accounts. Bank accounts I wire all your money out, sell off your short Twitter handle, scrape data from your other accounts and sell it off to a broker.
When you register a domain, you are prompted to put it for sale. You don't have to. As the article points out, a lot of people register domains for optionality. Maybe one day I'll use that for a project. And that optionality isn't worth an infinite amount of money.
It reminds me of the "24 Hours of Lemons" joke racing series. The rules require participants to send in a car worth less than $500. To enforce this, the operators reserve the right to buy any participating vehicle for $501. If you act in bad faith and under-price your entry, you get it bought out from under you.
The problem is that works well for enforcing an upper bound on price. You need a different model for enforcing a lower bound. Maybe the renewal fees are scaled according to the stated price to provide a reason not to claim everything is worth millions.