How is $70,000 not much? OK sure, companies can be expected to deal with a bit higher number than the median revenues of citizens. However concurrent businesses won't flourish if there is an entry paying wall which by far exceed individual capacities.
First on barriers: Becoming a reseller to an existing registrar requires far less than $70k. In fact there's tens if not hundreds of thousands of these types of businesses out there.
Second, being a registrar is a ton of responsibility and you cannot start thinking it should be as easy as starting your handmade jewelry business.
And finally, no, $70k is not a lot of money especially for a stable business with a sound business plan. Banks especially love loaning money on reliable income sources, and domain names are very stable.
> demonstration of the ability to procure liquid capital immediately available in the applicant's name at the commencement of the accreditation period in an amount of US$70,000 or more will be deemed adequate, although a lesser amount will be accepted upon a showing that in the circumstances it will provide adequate working capital.
So, if you have a way to show that less will work, ICANN says they're flexible. IMHO, if you're a registrar trying to make money, you need to expect to sell a lot of domains, and so you'll probably need much more credit than $70k to manage payments from customers and to registries and ICANN.
Fixed fees are $4k/year, per registrar variable fees were about $1.5k last year if I read the reports correctly. Registrar margin tends to be about 10%, unless you're a specialty registrar, so you've got to be selling $55k/year of domains to break even on the ICANN fees. Let's call that $4,500/month for easy math. But ICANN presumes you need 5 full time employees for customer service; indeed says 18000 INR/month for customer service base salary in India [1], which is about $200/month USD. Five employees is $1,000/month but my US rule of thumb is all-in costs is at least 2x, so you need $20,000/month in domain sales to cover that.
With the icann fees and the employee costs, you need $24,500/month in sales to break even. I'm happy to ignore computing costs, it's probably not nothing, but you can do a lot with a little these days.
$70,000 is not quite 3 times the minimum sales number. Having that much credit available means you can continue to pay suppliers(registries) if your payment provider puts an unexpected hold on your payments, as long as it's resolved within less than three months. That doesn't seem like an unreasonable ask for customer continuity.
But, if it's too much; there are reseller programs. OpenSRS was reseller only when it launched in the first batch of ICANN accredited registrars. Annual fees and credit requirements are much less to be a reseller; if you end up with enough volume that being a registrar instead of a reseller makes sense, you'll likely have accumulated available credit, too.
How is $70,000 not much? OK sure, companies can be expected to deal with a bit higher number than the median revenues of citizens. However concurrent businesses won't flourish if there is an entry paying wall which by far exceed individual capacities.