Yes, someone has to run the official registry, so there's a choke point, unless there are rules in place to prevent abuse. For Verisign's management of .com the

Yes, someone has to run the official registry, so there's a choke point, unless there are rules in place to prevent abuse. For Verisign's management of .com there's a contract that limits their power. For the new vanity domains there often isn't, so I'm afraid that we will see a lot of this: a cheap price to register a domain, and then a whopping price increase to keep it.