Credit cards have expiry dates, or at least they do over here. I expect my partners domain to expire 10 years after my death, as I can only pay 10 years in advance. To many people, there are more important things to worry about (and often second thoughts after the fact).
Hate to say, but might actually be a legitimate use case for blockchain here. Identity provider which is responsible for being a source of truth on aliveness tied to a smart contract for paying annual registrar fees.
Though the traditional way would just be finding a registrar which can direct debit (e.g. CSC Global or MarkMonitor) or setting up a trust account for someone to manage it for you. Or just power of attorney plus escrowed account.
A promise of money in the future is worth less than getting this money now. Present value (PV) here would be - how much you would pay now to get $X after T time.
Turns out that sum of PV($X in 1 year) + PV($X in 2 years) + … converges even though the series is infinite. Look up “perpetual bonds”.
The value of $10 paid annually forever is probably $200-500 depending on [things].
Source: I work in a bank but I’m also shit at finance so take this with a large grain of salt.
I agree, although if a business decides to close a service could it get tricky? What if all other providers charge much more and the provider can't sell your domain on to them to manage? Or they sell it on to an unscrupulous provider? A yearly fee means they can't get all the cash up front and then run.
Why hasn’t anyone made a TLD with infinite expiration?
The price should just be the present value of the annual fee cash flows.