That is right, Domain Name prices are being raised to $30.43 if you buy them... on the year 2030.
And that is wrong. They should cost $30.43 today ! ! !
Background
VeriSign owns the distribution of all dot-com and dot-net domains (and a few others) authorized by the ICANN (the Internet body responsible for names and numbers on the Internet). They have a monpoly contract with ICANN and currently they sell the domains for $6.00 on bulk-orders for registrars (companies that sell domains to end users). ICANN has authorized VeriSign to raise their prices 7% every year. This year VeriSign is raising the price of a domain name from $6.00 to $6.42 per year (for new domains or renewals).
I tell this is an absurd. VeriSign should immediately raise the price to $30 per year, or more. I beg them to do it. You should as well, and here is why...
Domain Case
With domain names being so cheap, anyone can buy one. Every company has multiple domains names (sometimes hundreds or thousands), lots of bloggers have their own domain name, lots of individuals have their own domain name. In fact, there are more than 65 million registered dot-com domains.
Now, let's say you have a new business, a pet shop, and you want to look for a good domain name. Forget pet.com, that was taken a while ago. Forget any combination of the word "pet" with pretty much any other word that would generate any meaning (petsmart, petfood, petshop, petstore, ...). All taken as well. How about using the city name, like petseattle.com? Taken. Heck, you end up with something that has 3 dashes and 15 characters or more and that none of your customers are capable of remember or spell it.
That all would be fair, if those domain names were being used by "real" businesses, but they are not. Do me a favor, go to www.petseattle.com. Is that a "real" business? Depends on your definition, but they have nothing to do with pets. They just bought the domain name to sell it to somebody else with a huge overhead.
That would be fair except the problem with domain names being so cheap is that people buy thousands of domains in the hope of selling a couple for tens of thousands of dollars. Wouldn't you invest $6,000 in domain names if you knew you could get $20,000 by selling two or three domains in a year?
And then there are companies like Marchex that make a living by buying hundreds of thousands of domains and showing nothing but ads on those domains. Just pick a random product and put between "buy-" and ".com", let's say "buy-car.com". What do you see? A site that only purpose is to drive traffic to other sites, using advertising and affiliate programs as a mean of generating revenue. They don't really create any value.
It gets worse. Some sites are just created to mislead customers. Look at www.hosting-review.com (#6 result for "Hosting Comparison" on Google). This is not a "real" business. Nobody really evaluated/compared anything there. Clearly, the "IX Web Hosting" paid a lot of money to appear between some known and some unknown hosting companies to make it look legit.
On cases like this, the increase from $6.00 / year to $30.00 / year won't make much of a difference, but on many other cases it will. Remember that these people / companies have thousands of domain. If they were spending $6,000 per year on those domains, it will be a big deal if the cost was $30,000.
Compare to Phone Numbers
What if, somebody could buy any telephone number for just $6 / year, and they could buy them in bulk, with an easy process, just a simple form and they reserve all the numbers for 444-xxxx for $6,000 / year. Anyone that wants a 444-xxxx needs to buy it from that person, and he can mark it up as much as he wants. Let's say, $100 / phone-number / year (that is a 1500% ROI). Ok, you might say "screw the 444, I'll buy a 445-xxxx for $6.00 / year". Oops. Another company bought that range. Wait a second... More than 800 companies bought 1,000-number ranges and all the numbers left are being used by other customers. Think about that.
Would the US government do something about it if phone numbers (which is limited by their nature) were being manipulated like that?
Call your Representative in Congress, call your Senator, call the President (avoid the Vice, though), call ICANN, call VeriSign. Call whomever is necessary to make this clear misusage of a limited resource stop.
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owns the distribution of all dot-com and dot-net domains (and a few others) authorized by the 
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October, 2007