Premium prices are set at the registry level, and for Google's TLDs, are charged annually. The EAP fee is a one time only up-front cost.
Domains being sold by resellers are something different entirely, but yeah, some registrars that participate in reseller networks may lump those in as "premium" as well, which is confusing. Those prices tend to be one-time acquisition costs.
Because this is your area of expertise, can I ask you why more registrars are not selling 10 or 20 year domain ownership? Who wants a domain for just a year (if you agree with the premise behind individuals owning domains in the first place)?
Most TLDs allow registration lengths up to 10 years. And registrars will happily sell you registration for 10 years. Buy the domain, then immediately renew it for 9 years. I suspect the reason they don't offer a choice of registration years in the initial checkout flow is to reduce purchasing friction -- they don't want you to have to make another choice and then potentially back out of the sale. It's the same reason e-commerce sites will ask you for as little information as they can get away with when checking out your cart; for digital sales many retailers just do zip code instead of full address since they're not shipping anything.
As for longer registration periods than that, I suspect it's the same reason you can't, e.g., call up your cable company and try to pre-pay 50 years of service. They have no idea what things will be like that far down the road, and they don't want to have such longstanding obligations weighing on them.
It comes down to business decisions, not technical issues; technically speaking the spec allows for up to a 99 year registration period, though I'm not aware of any TLDs that support that. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5731#section-2.5
I recently read an HN thread about Romanian ccTLD registry selling domains for lifetime. They have stopped it and asked the former customers to pay up though.
And also ccTLDs can make up whatever rules they want, whereas gTLDs are all bound by the same common set of rules. There are many ccTLDs that don't even use EPP (the spec I linked to above).
We already have enough sleazy domain squatters holding names for years and trading for ridiculous prices. Instead of long ownerships, we should have some way to prove you're actually using the domain after a certain number of years.
I disagree. At the end of the day, they are still vanity domain names. Adding more paperwork and process doesn't change that.
For example, pitch a solution that doesn't just make squatters upload some bare bones index.html. Or check a registrar's checkbox to park the domain somewhere with content. Or, well, upload the minimum amount of substance that you think is necessary.
Think about how you could possibly design such a program to ensure use, and how you'd prevent parking site services from cropping up that would make a site just meet the requirements for continuing registration. And if it's not a purely automated process, then the base registration price would have to go way up to pay for all the human work going into validations.
And now imagine the public outcry that can happen every time people have their domains taken from them (rightly or wrongly).
No, no registry wants to be in the business of doing that. You continue to pay for the name, it's yours.
We should stop calling organisations who hog domains in order to accrue an exaggerated profit from them "domain squatters". A real "domain squatter" should be someone who employs the "domain hogger's" domain until the domain hogger decides to actually do something with it themselves.
We wouldn't need such a profusion of TLDs (most of which are awful: .dev is an exception) if real domain squatting was made feasible.
The biggest problem with squatters is that they pay 100x less then you do for a domain. If they had to pay the same price they would squat on way less domains.
Domains being sold by resellers are something different entirely, but yeah, some registrars that participate in reseller networks may lump those in as "premium" as well, which is confusing. Those prices tend to be one-time acquisition costs.