
In Verisign's eyes this made the vast majority of new domains "redundant".
Possibly that's because the vast majority of new domains *are* redundant and are simply the result of defensive registrations by existing businesses such as eg mybusiness.com trying to make sure that nobody starts up eg mybusiness.co.uk or mybusiness.biz or whatever and either stealing their customers or saying "we'll sell you this domain name for £x,000 Squire".
There's also the question of why certain dot-domains cost more than others. Do they cost more to set up? Do they cost more to administer? Or is this just an excuse for the Registrars to screw more money out of people who want a certain dot-domain suffix? I'll give you three guesses...