@egol Most domain hosts charge one year at a time and set credit cards on auto-renewal so that people don't need to remember to renew their domains. When I asked my host about renewing for 3 years after reading this patent, they told me that I was the first person to ever ask them that and that most site owners were fine with one year at a time, and auto-renewal being set on their credit cards.
It is very unlikely that only spammers set domain registration for one year - it seems that both site owners and hosts set them up for one year at a time, with auto-renewal possibly set.