I sincerely wish that this would happen with all domain registrations. Maybe not $250/yr, but $100/yr would be OK.
It wouldn't bother anybody that owns a few domains for business or even personal use.
It would slow down spamming techniques that rely on registering lots of different domains.
It would almost entirely halt domain squatting.
Comments like this are why this weird social closure that so many tech people delight in is so disturbing.
There's a lot I think I could say about this. I've been a pretty poor dude in the past, and not terribly wealthy now, even if it is in one of the richest countries in the world.
But I don't expect I could have a good conversation about it here.
I think roughly an order of magnitude increase of price is going to bother a lot of people who have domains for other than profit-earning businesses. (OTOH, people who have a profitable business model, including spammers, might well not be all that bothered. So I think you've got the impacts basically backwards.)
You live in some rich-country-bubble.
It really didn't stop speculation at all, in fact Robert Grant (well known domain speculator) made most of his money back in the days when domains were priced at $100.
However, I do believe that the current cheap domains have made the "register expired page-ranked domains" SEO scheme work, and it probably wouldn't be going on if it wasn't for cheap domains.
(The "I'm not advocating this" part seems to weaken this, though. )
If the problem isn't "domain name registration might be unaffordable for the impoverished"... maybe it's worth thinking about what the problem is?
Most of the world can't seriously afford $100/year for a domain registration. Get out of your bubble.
Sorry for the FTFY, validity of your comment understated by a large magnitude.