Bear with me for a moment: I firmly believe that in order for good .com domains to be available for a smaller price the registry fee should be far higher. The reason for that is speculation: even though a .com registration is dirty cheap, getting a decent .com domain is very expensive because for many companies it is worth it to keep the domains parked, and when someone wants to buy one of them it gets very expensive…
Or how about we restructure the whole relationship so that wildly excessive amounts of money don't end up in either Verisign or ICANN regardless of what the price is.