If you are really interested you can check: http://logicboxes.com/consultancy/ they provide ICANN accreditation consultacy
ICANN is holding a conference at which hints of revised accreditation procedures may be given.I suggest you get the update. I am not sure whether this was a scheduled conference or in response to the situation at a certain troubled registrar.
- Was 25 not 29 but now it's 22 - Variable fee (quarterly) paid once you begin registering domain names. This fee represents a portion of ICANN's operating costs. (average $2k-2.5K per year) - Also you must be insured for $1mil USD - You prepay the registries for the pack of names you want to register (for example if buy a pack of 1000 .com names you pay upfront $6K)
Following on from the RegisterFly debacle there has been a lot of talk within ICANN about how they can avoid this kind of issue in the future. Personally I don't think the accreditation aspect is the decider.
A registrar wanna be without a bullet proof business model must not think it more than 2 seconds. It doesn't worth it. If you understand this a business that you must loose to gain something back (even for registrars that sell higher than they pay, still there are support, yearly icann fees, hardware...) and that only large domain volumes can sustain you to this business it's easy to say 'no thanks' Domains are as i call them the cherries or the happy hour to create a customer base
Yeah you have to have a lot of capital to become a registrar and theres a lot of registers now probably better of with a domain reseller account.