Funny, I've heard all these same complaints about second-level domains. It's a human-readable addressing scheme. At some point, words will be used. The more memorable, the more usable. All those words that were "too important" to be used as TLDs should be allowed as TLDs precisely because they are important. TLDs should be open to any string of characters, unicode if possible, and registrars should have universal sin…
ICANN's failure to abolish TLDs entirely simply confirms what we already know: It's a scam organization, dedicated to doing essentially nothing except setting up as many of these rip-offs as possible. First there was the $60K rip-off for registrar applicants (even when they were rejected), and now this even more offensive money-grab.